Niels Arden Oplev’s realisation of the first of the late Stieg Larsson’s enormously successful Millennium crime trilogy demonstrates the difference, in cinematic terms, between a delicious Smörgåsbord and the kind of fast food offered by the current mainstream. Larsson depicts a Sweden in which big business still has the blood of Nazi collaboration on its hands, where corporate crime oils the cogs of an economy that’s supposedly about comfortable social democracy, and where the abduction and murder of a string of young women (monstrous crimes unflinchingly depicted in scene-of-crime photos) remain unsolved; all this against a backdrop of lingering racism and patriarchal misogyny.
 
Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is an investigative journalist and editor of the left wing, Stockholm-based journal Millennium who is set to go to jail for libelling a powerful tycoon after a high profile media circus of a court case. Prior to beginning his sentence Mikael is asked by wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the unsolved disappearance of the old man’s niece decades previously in the picturesque coastal town dominated by Vanger’s palatial family seat. Meanwhile, the lawyer of the Vanger family has been employing the misfit hacker wizard Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) to root out information. The implacable intertwining of narratives between the two leads – Nyqvist’s rumpled Mikael, the still, observational foil to Lisbeth’s volatile dark matter – is expertly done. The thematic parallels and interplay running through the plot strands, welded together by hardcore depictions of rape, torture and serial killer sickness, makes for a film far more harrowing and disturbing than a screechy horde of recent horror films, and in Oplev (We Shall Overcome, 2006) it has a director who has the guts, and apparently the creative freedom, to let us get to know the characters by letting them get to know each other.
 
There were moments when I feared the film would lose its dark edge, the dialogue and increasingly quirky character interaction between Lisbeth and Mikael entering the realm of the mannered. But a graphic depiction of a blowjob used as a form of barter by the ‘victim’ – who seems to make light of it herself – wrong-footing the audience early on, had already set the tone, followed as it was by an uncompromisingly explicit depiction of torture and rape. Anyone expecting a comic book, wisecracking crime caper or a stately excursion into Inspector Morse territory will be sorely disappointed. It’s true that the rich and influential family, around which the disappearance of the teenage relative revolves, are a motley crew and stock detective fiction fare, while the stylised prop of Lisbeth’s motorbike-revving heroine enters the realm of the graphic novel. But it is precisely because Stieg Larsson’s original vision contains such familiar genre staples that the transgressive twist imparted to them makes the outing so effective. And then there’s the equally transgressive nature of Lisbeth herself. More credible at face value as a police interviewee who’s walked in off the street, Noomi Rapace’s jagged, dark-haired, body-pierced and tattooed Lisbeth is a compelling performance. Not since Ann Parillaud’s Nikita has a heroine looked so strikingly iconic. There’s a bird-like rapaciousness about Lisbeth, superbly portrayed by Rapace, who pierced, punished and cropped herself to give her character the appearance and manners of a Goth Emo, nigh-on autistic in her researcher-cum-hacker brilliance; introverted, wrapped within her own dark bisexual wings, she possesses an extremely dangerous pair of talons, courtesy of a dysfunctional and abused background, should anyone dare to ruffle those raven feathers.
 
The open spaces and cool hues of Eric Kress’s beautiful photography are worthy of the often chill expanses of Scandinavian jazz, although the film’s soundtrack, with its tense ebb and flow of high-lying strings, familiar dark thriller accompaniment, works well. It is these open spaces which underscore the distance the protagonists put between themselves and others, making the moments of connection and intimacy all the more warm and vivid. The story entails a labyrinth of false trails, but despite a running time of over two and a half hours you feel invested and absorbed in the characters so effectively that you remain happy to stick around. Like a good book, when Neils Arden Oplev’s film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is over, you wish it wasn’t. Luckily, the second and third parts of Laarson’s Millennium trilogy are already in the can. Just in the nick of time – the Hollywood version of the first book is already in pre-production.