rating: ★★★★1/2

It’s hard to imagine a heroine as peculiar and intriguing as Lisbeth Salander. She speaks in brief, monotone monosyllables. She dresses like a member of some kind of underground Goth band. She is a genius computer hacker with a photographic memory. She’s practically a sociopath. She’s anything but conventional. But, basic plot aside, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is hardly a conventional film.

Rooney Mara takes over the iconic role of Lisbeth Salander: hacker, heroine extraordinaire.

David Fincher, the director of Se7en and The Social Network, had quite the task on his hands making an English-language adaptation of the popular Swedish crime novel by the late Stieg Larsson. The trilogy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has sold over 30 million copies and has legions of faithful readers. It already spawned a popular Swedish film trilogy starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist. The bar was already set high. Luckily, Fincher more than delivered.

For those people who are unfamiliar with this Swedish phenomenon, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a crusading journalist who is convicted of libel against a wealthy businessman. With his reputation in tatters, he accepts a job from an aging industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), who lives on a secluded island in northern Sweden. Vanger wants him to discover the killer of his grandniece who disappeared from the island over 35 years earlier. Vanger suspects one of his family members is responsible.

While Blomkvist deals with his legal troubles, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) works as an investigator for a security company. She is a ward of the state and when her guardian suffers a debilitating stroke, she is assigned to a sexually abusive new guardian. As she deals with her abusive guardian, Blomkvist hires her as an assistant investigator to help with his research into the Vangers. Together, Blomkvist and Salander uncover a serial killer and a seedy underbelly to the social democratic utopia of Sweden.

Larsson’s novels aren’t what you’d consider typical reading for the average person. They have complex protagonists who are unlike most stock heroes found in pulpy thrillers. They serve as an exposé of the evils in modern society, such as financial corruption, misogyny, human trafficking and secret governmental crime. In real life, Larsson was a crusading journalist much like his creation Mikael Blomkvist, and so the books can be seen as his airing of grievances with modern Swedish society.

Fincher’s film doesn’t shy away from any of this tough subject matter and refuses to flinch when depicting its most disturbing scenes, such as a brutal rape scene and a just-as-brutal revenge scene. Fincher handles the sexual violence very delicately. He makes the scene uncompromisingly horrifying and if any viewer were to get aroused by it, he would become much the same as the misogynistic monsters the film depicts and condemns. In essence, the events of the film reveal the inclinations of the male viewer and either educate or condemn him.

In many ways The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a conventional serial killer story, complete with scandalous family secrets, the killer mimicking Bible verses and a limited setting right out of an Agatha Christie story. However, where it differs from most conventional crime stories is how it deals with real socio-political problems. To dismiss Dragon Tattoo as merely conventional is to ignore the glimmers of the very real social evils that it explores. The serial killer storyline is pulpy and satisfying, but it is the fact that it pushes for a deeper, more uncompromising vision of society’s evils that makes Dragon Tattoo fascinating.

Daniel Craig is the perfect choice for Mikael Blomkvist. His rugged charm, established from playing James Bond, matches the character’s. Craig’s vulnerability, as evidenced by his predilection to take parts where he is tortured, also suits the role’s demands. Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander is a fascinating individual, partially due to her peculiar, detached performance, and partially due to how compelling the character is written. The biggest compliment that can be paid Mara is that she holds her own when the character was made iconic by Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is moody, eerie and full of dread. This is their second time collaborating with Fincher (their first was the score for The Social Network, which nabbed them an Oscar), and here even more than in The Social Network, their musical aesthetic perfectly matches the material.

The cinematography is beautiful and calculated. Realistically-lit, moody still shots and perfectly-framed slow-crawling dollies create an atmosphere of dread. The dour Swedish landscape threatens to seep off the screen and infect you. This is without a doubt the most atmospheric film of the year.

David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is more than a remake of Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish film version. It is more calculated, more streamlined and more focused on Fincher’s fascinations than Larsson’s. The source material may not be the most brilliant crime fiction, but it is extremely compelling and Fincher elevates it to the level of his previous explorations of serial killers, Se7en and Zodiac.

It is the perfect counter-programming to all the escapism that appears during the holiday movie season. It is entertaining, but it refuses to look away from the evils of society. It forces you to stare at the most despicable aspects of the world and realize what evil lurks beneath the surface of respectability.

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Photo: Supplied