Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo boasts little of the bravado and boisterously loud filmmaking that coats The Social Network. But has he nevertheless made a fine film? Well, of course he has. By refusing to shrink from the explicitness and darkness of its Swedish original Fincher may not have satisfied as wide an audience, but he has certainly created a film that is ten times the better for it. Scenes such as the brief nightclub interlude, the torture scene, and a darkly compelling scene of anal rape – incredible in its animalism and in the starkness of Lisbeth’s shrieks – show Fincher’s mastery of representations of evil. 

Add in Reznor and Ross (who also gave us the soundtrack to The Social Network) to provide the pulse to these vulgar visuals —  a deep beat throbbing through the violence — and sounds and images are fused. These scenes shout ‘LISTEN! If I want to make my movie jump then I will, and you’ll shiver at the sight of it’.

This is precisely what they do. The visuals are as crisp as the characters and climate are cold, and as always with this story and the loopy Stieg Larsson world, we’re left looking at and thinking about Lisbeth. She’s an invincible bitchy Batman with superwoman capabilities, packed into a tiny but explosive mind and body of vengeance. Rooney Mara masters her. Despite modest claims that she had to do little but turn up and follow Fincher’s lead, she evidently put everything into this. The smooth girl-next-door beauty of Erica Albright (her character in The Social Network) has gone, and in its place appears an  albinoesque punk with sandpaper skin wrapped in coal black hair and eyeliner. 

Craig is, in contrast, as sturdy but bland as Blomkvist should be. He goes about his detective work in that Fincherian fashion we know from Se7en,  with the trademark sequences of pure proceduralism. This is combined with the investigation for investigation’s sake that also pervades Zodiac. But in comparison to those two masterpieces, this side of Dragon Tattoo is largely muted. Fincher has stayed loyal to the original adaptation, but the one notable difference is a drastic dilution of the plot details, in exchange for what feels like a greater emphasis on Lisbeth and her male demons. In some places the film seems too long, and a sense of the covering of old ground is inevitable in a remake of this kind. Fincher’s take on the first leg of the trilogy still manages to be a boiling pot of vengeance, erotica, cybergeekery and sadism. The opening titles alone are hipper than most films manage to be in their totality. Go. See. Enjoy. 

4 stars