MOVIES

How to ruin a thrilling Swedish franchise

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009)

Even if you’d never read the Stieg Larsson novel that started all the cultural trouble, as a film, director Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation still holds up as a compelling, dark and suitably Gothic piece of anticapitalist, pro-feminist and prescient anti-rise-of-the-European-far-right millennial neo-noir.

Larsson’s original Swedish title for his posthumously published novel translates as “Men Who Hate Women”, and that perhaps serves as a far more useful guide to the Millennium Trilogy’s intention than its subsequent focus on its unique heroine’s body markings. In the creation of Lisbeth Salander — the bisexual, pierced, tattooed, computer hacking, feminist revengebent heroine of the series — Larsson created a before-her-time, kick-ass and memorable avenger for the age. It remains to Oplev’s credit that he cast the compelling Noomi Rapace, below, in the lead role and complemented her slowly boiling rage with the rumpled weariness of Michael Nyqvist as journalist sidekick Mikael Blomkvist to create a drama of justice fighters. Unlike the heavy-handed and unnecessary English language remake, the Swedish cinematic adaptation does a good job of remaining predominantly true to its source material. It’s a mix of thriller and investigative journalism elements and it manages to succeed in delivering a complex adventure that delivers food for thought plus thrills. This is in no small part thanks to the enigmatic but hard-to-look-away-from performance of Rapace and a pessimistic overall aesthetic that reminds you of why this story could only be told in the Swedish winter. In 2005 when the book was published, it seemed that the idea of a die-hard Nazi villain holed up on an island in the neighbourhood of the Arctic Circle might have seemed a tad ludicrous. But after the 2011 shootings by neo-fascist Anders Breivik and the rise of the far right in Europe and the US it seems that before his untimely death, Larsson may have seen something we all should have noticed.

Rapace and Nyqvist went on to star in a further two films adapted from the author’s original trilogy and together the three Swedish films stand alone as well-executed adaptations of their original source material that needed no further interference from Hollywood.

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