The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

To see the Swedish film adaptation of Steig Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) last night. Noomi Rapace is brilliant as Lisbeth Salandar, the troubled tattoed cybersleuth who joins crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist)in a bid to uncover an increasingly disturbing mystery surrounding the disappearance of a young woman forty years earlier. The story introduces Swedish Nazis and plenty of grisly revelations along the way. This is not a film for the faint-hearted any more than the book - and its theme of 'men who hate women' has attracted plenty of controversy - but it is still at heart a tale of good and evil. It is also a cracking thriller which despite its 2h 45 it rattles along with pace, ditching extraneous aspects of the book and focusing on the principal plotlines. I read the thriller at Christmas, and the film is as faithful an adaptation as is possible, capturing the characters and landscape as one imagines it. It deserves a better critical reception than it has received.