In the Flesh: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) (Patreon)

Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy dominated the early and mid 2000s so thoroughly you could buy the books in most grocery stories. One might be forgiven for assuming their tremendous popularity was a product of mediocrity, but the books are bracingly solid and unromantic, meticulously crafted murder mystery novels about a hotshot journalist and a deeply traumatized hacker digging into Sweden’s brutally misogynistic underworld. Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the most technically perfect adaptations I’ve ever seen, transposing Larsson’s clear, crisp prose into equally brisk yet beautiful imagery. Oplev’s camera is unflinching, his attention to detail complete. In particular the scenes of sexual violence which helped propel the books to unlikely mainstream success are rendered here with cold, hateful precision, all sentiment and sensuality stripped away until what we’re seeing could not possibly be mistaken for sex.

As Lisbeth Salander, actress Noomi Rapace is so tightly wound you can almost hear her cracking. The film never needs to sit its audience down and explain her traumatic past beyond a few quick flashbacks and a brief reunion with her mother because that past is evident in her every line and motion. There is a tremendous economy of speech and movement to the performance, one subtly foiled by Michael Nyqvist’s turn as disgraced Millennium magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Nyqvist is open and easygoing, a touch of fatalism informing his soft manner. He’s here mostly as an audience surrogate, a way for us to enter this world of straightforward, non-Hollywood hacking and buried Swedish Nazism among the country’s elite without getting lost in the noise, yet he pulls it off so effortlessly that by the time we realize he’s in over his head, we’re right there with him, lost at sea.

The case around which the film is structured is elegantly paced, free of splashy reveals and sudden reversals. A girl disappears. A man investigates. There is a tremendous amount of archival research and interviewing which, to Oplev’s credit, never feels tedious or difficult to understand. Sets are dressed with a refreshing naturalism, dialogue is brisk but not humorless or lifeless, and the film’s color palette makes a wise departure from the era’s cool blues to play instead with tans, whites, blacks, and browns. With a series of chilling antagonists both petty and monstrous and a complete absence of romantic feeling for the ugliness it digs through, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feels like a glimpse into an alternate path for pop culture, one where honest confrontation of unmentionable subjects becomes the norm rather than an infrequent and taboo discursion.