The Swedish thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, strives to capture the serial killer grime-chic of Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, with a twist. It’s contextualized through a culture operating on a hush-hush debasement of women. The movie is unfortunately only serious to its ends of shock titillation. Filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev carelessly pitches heroine Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) revenge-raping her parole officer with a dildo as a moment of empowerment and sado-masochistic fantasy. Rapace has charisma as the socially abused and isolated computer hacker investigating the case of a missing woman. She’s also far too stunning a goth/punk model for the story’s sociological potential. Running a tension-preventative 2.5 hours, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is so bent on cheap kicks (throw in some stuff about Nazis as well), it never stares into the darkness it proposes.
This article appears in Apr 15-21, 2010.
Loved it. One of the best screen adaptations of any book I’ve ever seen. Steig Larsson’s book was fascinating but a difficult and sometimes even tedious read. The movie, on the other hand, was much more crisp, and the story was crystal clear. When the movie ended after two and a half hours of rapt, edge-of-your-seat tension virtually the entire audience, including me, stood up and applauded. Noomi Repace’s unflinching stare as she witnesses the horrible death of the film’s antagonist conveyes a bottomless darkness that I felt more than fulfilled the requirements of the story’s premise. I also think that the “stuff about Nazis” was crucial to the plot. Without the sick influence Nazi hatred and anti-semitism there would have been no reason for the murders that lead to the unravelling of the mystery. Don’t miss it.