Movies 2010 #19 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I really enjoyed Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a streamlined, focused film that captures the essence of the page-turner novel while avoiding a slavish adherence to the source material.

Buoyed by excellent casting, the film easily fills its two and a half hour running time. The basic plot is a variation on a locked room mystery, where a young girl disappears without a trace from an island whose only exit is blocked by an accident. The girl, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering. Decades later, disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is enlisted to unravel the mystery. Serendipitously joined in the investigation by Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, the titular Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,) the pair begin to unravel a story which is deeper and darker than anything they imagined when they started their investigation. Blending the core mystery with 40 years of the family intrigue of one of Sweden’s great industrial families makes for a complex, satisfying story that winds its way through possibilities to the very end.