The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) – N. A. Oplev

Grim and ugly.  The original Norwegian title apparently translates to “Men who Hate Women” which seems apt for a film that is filled with sexual violence.  This is not the sort of content that I prefer to watch -- and indeed, we turned off the Fincher remake a few years ago during a rape scene.  However, following further, the horror and sadness evoked by seeing these experiences of women is (only somewhat) allayed by the presence of a heroic and self-sufficient (if not fully empowered) female character, Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace).  She takes revenge on her rapist and also helps to solve the 40-year old mystery of the murdered teenager that drives the plot.  Lisbeth is a goth girl with the dragon tattoo and numerous piercings, under government-ordered guardianship, and a hacker by profession.  Her hacking job involves profiling investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist) for a rich industrialist who happens to be the uncle of the murdered girl, now in his eighties.  He hires Blomkvist to solve the murder that the police could not, in a frozen and remote part of Norway.  Most of the family members are suspects.  Blomkvist and Salander are given enough backstory to feel like real people but the mystery itself (from Stig Larsson’s novel) seems to conclude rather abruptly (despite the film’s lengthy running time).  All told, I’m not sure I needed to see this – but Lisbeth Salander seems a valuable feminist hero to add to the canon (perhaps helping to inform the later zeitgeist that resulted in the “me too” movement).