Imagine Sweden: Stockholm and the river-ways, colder than ice, in the dead of winter. Imagine the difference between silent towns with not much more than snow, and cities fuming with 24-hour newscasts and nightclubs stocked with ecstasy. Imagine all this and you've got the setting for "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," a film that takes all of these images and places them under the constant surveillance of a camera lens.
The film revolves around a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), who is sued millions for libel and faces the dismal end of his career. Meanwhile, the executive of an ailing company, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), hires Blomkvist to investigate the decades old disappearance of his niece Harriet. Vanger presumes she has been murdered due to the limited access of his island home and that her killer, who sends him framed pictures of flowers on his birthday, is a family member who has never left the island. As his investigation wears on, Blomkvist finds a connection between various murders of women around the time of Harriet's disappearance and punishments in the Book of Leviticus. To help clear up the worsening events and find Harriet's killer, Blomkvist enlists the help of Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara); the young woman who did his background check before Vanger hired him. She is the girl with the dragon tattoo.
These days, almost every film looks beautiful, but "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is different. Though the intro's morphing ink to the tune of Led Zepplin's Immigrant Song seems to be playfully obscene and over the top, the film is not just having fun with pictures. It builds with each piece of the environment, each tattoo and piercing on Salander's small, pale body, each subtle expression, monstrous act, and the hidden brokenness and monstrous personalities of its characters.
But of course, the important things are not hidden. They climb out of whatever dark place they are born from and bite the viewer in the neck. Corrupt social workers are rapists, more than one character is a Nazi, more than one is a serial killer, and people face death in the worse ways. This seems to be the peculiar inversion of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Sexual activity and sexual violence are shown as explicitly as their rating will allow, but murder is only seen in photos and through newsreels.
The open sexuality of the characters contrasts with the fact that no one is above surveillance and no one is beyond being controlled. Blomkvist has no power compared to many people in the story and his privacy is violated on a whim. Salandar, though an adult with signs of verifiable genius, is judged by the State to be incompetent and is taken advantage of, to the point of sexual assault, by someone with more power than she has.
But people do breakaway and grab power for themselves in the film, but not always in the best of ways. One of the characters, a serial killer relative of Henrick, hangs Blomkvist from the ceiling and, before attempting to murder him, says that his and Mikael's hobbies are the same, but his need more towels to clean up. In the end, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" looks at the world and says that someone is either entitled to be an abuser or abused and any power ought to be taken. It is a film well worth seeing.
