The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an adaptation of Stieg Larson's novel by the same title based on the story of a disgraced journalist and a repeatedly victimised and mentally disturbed punk solving the 40 year old disappearance of a 16 year old girl.
The tone of the film is set up wonderfully in the first 20-30 minutes with an explanation of the protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's recent public embarrassment over his supposedly false journalistic claims on a media tycoon. He is condemned to six months in prison but before his sentence has to be served he is hired by the rich Henrik Vanger to discover who murdered his niece 40 years ago. From this point onwards things start to get increasingly darker and darker. With a ferocious rape sequence on a par with that of Irreversible that left me squirming in my seat and several others I will not mention due to potential spoiler warning's this is certainly not a film for the faint hearted. It is nice to see Sweden's recent penchant for the darker side of cinema with last year's release of Let the Right One In which also proved to be a fairly macabre experience.
The similarity between Dragon Tattoo and Let the Right One In is the way in which the plot of the film is built around some fairly complex and engaging character development between two social outcasts. For me it was not the plot of the film which particularly grabbed my attention, in all honesty there are some pretty horrendous cliché's such as decoding references from the bible to track down the killer-nothing particularly subversive going on there. It was the relationship between Lisbeth (literally the girl with the dragon tattoo) and Mikael that tied the film together to produce an interesting and original watch. Lisbeths clearly disturbed past and present provide us with a character that is both mysterious, sorrowful and threatening and Mikael is portrayed as a very ordinary middle aged man. Even if the plot itself does not avoid cliché at least the character's do. Looking back on some of my favourite thriller's it becomes evident that the main hooks of the films appear to be the interaction between certain character's: the classic example clearly being Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Other noticeable mentions being the relationship between Pitt and Freeman in Se7en.
Dragon Tattoo has a very slow pace to it which for me added hugely to the film-allowing us to connect with the character's struggle to comprehend how to decode the girl's disappearence. Nothing irritates me more in a thriller when the detective makes absolutely huge strides in his investigation within a matter of minutes e.g. the terrible Red Dragon. Dragon Tattoo is imbued with much more realism that many other thriller's I have ever seen due to this believably slow pace as well as some well crafted dialogue. One of the most commendable component's of the film is that I literally had no idea 'who dunnit' until a pain stakingly tense sequence which again had me writhing around in my seat like a baby that had just shat it's nappy.
My biggest problem with the film is that it went on for about twenty minutes after the "killer" had been discovered and within these last twenty minutes the entire tone of the film shifts to a much more saccharine and conventional ending with a hideous amount of closure that I really did not expect from the film. This problem could be attributed to the source material and not be the film maker's fault however I did feel that it left a fairly sour taste in my mouth compared to how impressed I had been with the rest of the text.
If you like the idea of watching something darker than anything that has graced our screens arguably since Antichrist (by no means am I stating it is on the same par of disturbance that Antichrist accomplishes) then this is definitely the film for you. Both humanistic in it's portrayal of the two protagonists, deeply engaging on a narrative level, meandering in pace and decidedly murky in tone this is a film not to be missed.
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