Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Michael Nygvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube
Released: 12/03/2010
Rated: 18
This gritty Swedish offering of both mystery and thriller grabs from the opening minutes, and takes you on a rollercoaster ride into the dark pasts of all its characters.
Based on the first in Stieg Larsson’s international best selling Millennium trilogy, the story centres on Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist who we see losing a libel trial at the beginning of the movie, and being sentenced to prison. His love interest, the mysterious Lisbeth Salander, a smart but sexy computer hacker – the titular girl with the dragon tattoo. Together they are enlisted to help find a girl who has been missing for more than 40 years. What follows is 2hours of utterly brilliant filmmaking. The film has a gritty feel to it, which adds to the break neck pace, and the character development is superb throughout.
It’s a rare gift when watching foreign film (the movie is in Larsson’s native Swedish, with English subtitles) that you can completely forget you are reading the subtitles after a while. You are so immersed in the story and in the characters that the fact you’re reading what is said is almost just an extra – and something I’d far prefer to the inevitable Hollywood remake that rumour has it is already in pre-production.
With brilliant performances from leads Nyqvist and Rapace, we can but hope plans to release The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second in the series, the film for which was released late last year in Sweden, appear for us in the UK soon.
For now though, sit back, and enjoy what is easily the best thriller I’ve seen this year.
James Gordon
Tags: dragon tattoo, thriller, world cinema
