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An engrossing Swedish thriller based on the bestselling novel by Stieg Larsson, its satisfyingly pulpy plot is like The Big Sleep updated with piercings and modems, says Mike McCahill. It’s as satisfying a mystery as you’ll watch this year.

This first in a trilogy of films inspired by Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium novels, this is as satisfying a mystery as you are likely to watch this year.

The film sets out an investigation on two fronts that eventually converge. Mikael is a journalist shamed by a libel action a wealthy industrialist brings against him; summoned by a mysterious phone call to a
remote island, he’s employed by a retired shipping magnate to track down his beloved niece, who went missing, presumed dead, four decades earlier.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a Gothy computer hacker paid to work against the journo during his trial, attempts to stay connected to Mikael’s laptop - this, while fending off the brutal ministrations of her new, sexually abusive guardian. The film’s original title translates as “Men Who Hate Women” (not exactly good box-office, one suspects), and a few of those are encountered along the way, yet there’s something refreshing in the way the Lisbeth strand comes to dodge and subvert all our expectations.

Instead, we get a satisfyingly twisty pulp plot: something like The Big Sleep, updated with piercings and modems. Director Niels Arden Oplev seeks out locations that very nearly rival Wallander for atmospheric parkiness, and he’s recruited tremendous faces in the lead roles, at least as vivid as those that may have leapt out from the page. Rapace - sulky and astoundingly cheekboned, doing her bit to raise the share value of clompy boots, black lippy and fingernails bitten down to the quick - may be the first great movie heroine of the decade.

Sensitive viewers should be warned that Oplev doesn’t shy away from Larsson’s darker lines of inquiry: it’s a rare film that earns its 18 certificate, while remaining on just the right side of exploitation.

Bring on parts two and three.

 

Mike McCahill on 25th June 2010
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