Set in Stockholm, and on the frozen island of Hedeby, with its cluster of grand estates and quirky cottages belonging to the rich and totally messed-up Vanger clan, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo digs its mitts into the twisted matter of Larsson's elaborate whodunit. And it introduces a formidable talent - Rooney Mara, whom Fincher gave a small role in The Social Network (as the girl who dumps Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). Mara, pierced and punked-out, is Lisbeth Salander, the asocial, bisexual genius hacker and misfit - one of the great heroines of detective fiction, as different from Miss Marple as a toot of crank is to a nice cup of tea.
If you've seen the Swedish film adaptations of the Millennium Trilogy and thought no one could inhabit Lisbeth like their star, Noomi Rapace, well, think again. Mara nails this damaged, determined soul - you can see it in her quick, sad eyes, in the cool but nervous manner by which she takes everything in. Lisbeth's rage, her pain, her intelligence - it's all here.
And speaking of James Bond, Daniel Craig sheds the suave Her Majesty's Secret Service airs to play Mikael Blomkvist. The intrepid investigative reporter has landed himself in a libel suit - publishing an apparently erroneous expose of a Swedish tycoon - thereby bringing shame on himself and his magazine, Millennium, and its publisher, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), who also happens to be his lover, even though she is married and her husband is all right with that. (Hey, hey, it's Sweden!) Craig brings a bookish verve to his performance, doing this weird thing with his eyeglasses, letting them dangle from one ear as he pores over problematic pieces of evidence.
