Rapace, like the troubled woman she plays, is scary.
Directed by Denmark's Niels Arden Oplev, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a giant at the European box office in 2009, finds the middle-aged, serious-minded reporter and magazine editor Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) in a deep predicament. Convicted of slander for an investigative piece gone awry, the disgraced journo is hired by an elderly tycoon to look into the disappearance, and presumed murder, of the latter's niece 40 years earlier.
It's a cold case, and a peculiar one, full of ugly family conflict, but Blomkvist takes it on: The money is good, and it's an excuse to get out of Stockholm and away from media scrutiny before he has to go serve his prison sentence.
Salander, who works for a private security firm - daunting computer chops and intellectual curiosity trump her abrasive personality and complete lack of social skills - finds herself first investigating Blomkvist, and then allied with him.
She has her own problems, too, most notably a new court-appointed guardian who is a sexual deviant, a brutal and imperious creep. The rape and torture scenes, a vivid (and necessary) component of Larsson's book, are rendered with fearless detail in the film. They are neither exploitative nor gratuitous, but they are certainly not easy to watch.
There's a gloomy Scandinavian current running beneath the surface of the mystery here: disturbing stuff about abuse and misogyny, Nazis and anti-Semitism, the rot at the heart of the civilized, socialist state. Oplev's direction is crisp and observant, and while Rapace's performance is the extraordinary one, Nyqvist's is solid and steady, and Sven-Bertil Taube, as the moneyed patriarch Henrik Vanger, is compelling.
Like Thomas Harris' novels (and subsequent screen adaptations) Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is rife with nightmarishly violent and horrific behavior. It's intense, graphic, frightening.
And, yes, exhilarating.
Contact movie critic Steven Rea
at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/
onmovies/
