movie review the girl with the dragon tattoo

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movie review the girl with the dragon tattoo

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The success of the heroine Lisbeth Salander suggests a hunger in audiences for an action picture hero who is not a white 35ish male with stubble on his chin. Such characters are often effective, but they sometimes seem on loan from other films. There are few characters anywhere like Salander, played here by Rooney Mara and by Noomi Rapace in the original 2009 Swedish picture. Thin, stark, haunted, with a look that crosses goth with S&M, she is fearsomely intelligent and emotionally stranded.

It has been a fascination with the lean, fierce Salander that draws me into the "Girl" movies. We know horrible things happened to her earlier in life that explain her anger and proud isolation. Her apartment in Stockholm is like an eagle's aerie. She has an isolated life online, distant relationships with a few other technology geeks and a bleak loneliness. One of the undercurrents of these movies is the very gradual rapport that grows between Lisbeth and Mikael Blomkvist, the radical investigative journalist. This is never the kind of movie where they're going to fall in love. That she even smiles is a breakthrough.

The stories churn in my mind. I've read two of the Stieg Larsson novels, seen all three of the Swedish films and now am back for my third tour through the first story. It's an odd feeling to be seeing a movie that resembles its Swedish counterpart in so many ways, yet is subtly different under the direction of David Fincher and with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian . I don't know if it's better or worse. It has a different air.

Fincher is certainly a more assured director than Niels Arden Oplev , who did the 2009 Swedish film. Yet his assurance isn't always a plus. The earlier film had a certain earnest directness that seemed to raise the stakes. Emotions were closer to the surface. Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace both create convincing Salanders, but Rapace seems more uneasy in her skin, more threatened. As the male lead Mikael Blomkvist, Michael Nyqvist seemed less confident, more threatened. In this film, Daniel Craig brings along the confidence of James Bond. How could he not? He looks too comfortable in danger.

The labyrinth of the story remains murky. The elderly millionaire Henrik Vanger ( Christopher Plummer ), cut off from the mainland on the family island, yearns to know how his beloved niece Harriet died 40 years ago. Because apparently neither she nor her body left the island on the day she disappeared, and no trace has ever been found, suspicion rests on those who were there that day, in particular other Vanger relatives whose houses overlook Henrik's from their own isolation.

They provide a snaky group of suspects. Many seem involved in corruption. Some have pasts with Nazi connections. Mikael arranges their photos and newspaper clippings and file cards in a collage pinned to a wall and connected with red lines of speculation, but his threads of suspicion seem to lead to … everyone.

In this film more than the original, the stories of Mikael and Lisbeth are kept separate for an extended period. We learn about the girl's state-appointed guardian (Yorick van Wageningen), who abused her, stole from her and terrorized her. Her attempts to avenge herself would make a movie of their own.

Zaillian's script comes down to a series of fraught scenes between his leads and a distinctive gallery of supporting characters, given weight by Stellan Skarsgard , Robin Wright and the iconic London actor Steven Berkoff . These people inhabit a world with no boring people. By providing Mikael with his own small cottage on the island, Henrik Vanger isolates him in a vulnerable situation, which sinks in as he realizes he's probably sharing the island with a murderer.

There's also the problem of why Henrik continues to receive watercolors of wildflowers on his birthday, a tradition that his niece began and inexplicably has continued after her death. If you subtract computers, geeks, goth girls, nose piercings, motorcycles and dragon tattoos, what we have at the bottom is a classic Agatha Christie plot. The island works as a sealed room. I realize most people will be seeing the story for the first time with this version. Because it worked for me, I suspect it will work better for them, because everything will be new. I'm happy to have seen both. If I had a choice of seeing one or the other for the first time, I'd choose the 2009 version. It seems closer to the bone, with a less confident surface. Even the Swedish dialogue adds to the effect; in English, the characters are concealing secrets but not so uncannily concealing themselves.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film Credits

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie poster

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Rated R for brutal violent content including rape and torture, strong sexuality, graphic nudity, and language

158 minutes

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander

Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist

Christopher Plummer as Henrik Vanger

Stellan Skarsgard as Martin Vanger

Robin Wright as Erika Berger

Joely Richardson as Anita Vanger

Steven Zaillian

Based on the book by

Stieg Larsson

Directed by

David Fincher

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Movie Review | 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

Tattooed Heroine Metes Out Slick, Punitive Violence

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By A. O. SCOTT

Dec. 19, 2011

Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs. The animating force in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy — incarnated on screen first by Noomi Rapace and now, in David Fincher’s adaptation of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” by Rooney Mara — Lisbeth is an outlaw feminist fantasy-heroine, and also an avatar of digital antiauthoritarianism.

Her appeal arises from a combination of vulnerability and ruthless competence. Lisbeth can hack any machine, crack any code and, when necessary, mete out righteous punitive violence, but she is also (to an extent fully revealed in subsequent episodes) a lost and abused child. And Ms. Mara captures her volatile and fascinating essence beautifully. Hurt, fury and calculation play on her pierced and shadowed face. The black bangs across her forehead are as sharp and severe as an obsidian blade, but her eyebrows are as downy and pale as a baby’s. Lisbeth inspires fear and awe and also — on the part of Larsson and his fictional alter ego, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played in Mr. Fincher’s film by Daniel Craig) — a measure of chivalrous protectiveness.

She is a marvelous pop-culture character, stranger and more complex than the average superhero and more intriguing than the usual boy wizards and vampire brides. It has been her fate, unfortunately, to make her furious, inspiring way through a series of plodding and ungainly stories.

The Swedish screen version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” directed by Niels Arden Oplev, often felt like the very long pilot episode of a television crime show, partly because of Larsson’s heavy-footed clumsiness as a storyteller. Despite the slick intensity of Mr. Fincher’s style, his movie is not immune to the same lumbering proceduralism. There are waves of brilliantly orchestrated anxiety and confusion but also long stretches of drab, hackneyed exposition that flatten the atmosphere. We might be watching “Cold Case” or “Criminal Minds,” but with better sound design and more expressive visual techniques. Hold your breath, it’s a time for a high-speed Internet search! Listen closely, because the chief bad guy is about to explain everything right before he kills you!

It must be said that Mr. Fincher and the screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, manage to hold on to the vivid and passionate essence of the book while remaining true enough to its busy plot to prevent literal-minded readers from rioting. (There are a few significant changes, but these show only how arbitrary some of Larsson’s narrative contrivances were in the first place.) Using harsh and spooky soundtrack music (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ) to unnerving and powerful effect, Mr. Fincher creates a persuasive ambience of political menace and moral despair.

He has always excelled at evoking invisible, nonspecific terrors lurking just beyond the realm of the visible. The San Francisco of “Zodiac” was haunted not so much by an elusive serial killer as by a spectral principle of violence that was everywhere and nowhere, a sign of the times and an element of the climate. And the Harvard of “The Social Network,” with its darkened wood and moody brick, seemed less a preserve of gentlemen and scholars than a seething hive of paranoia and alienation.

Mr. Fincher honors Larsson’s muckraking legacy by envisioning a Sweden that is corrupt not merely in its ruling institutions but in the depths of its soul. Lisbeth and Mikael — whose first meeting comes around the midpoint of the movie’s 158-minutes — swim in a sea of rottenness. They are not quite the only decent people in the country, but their enemies are so numerous, so powerful and so deeply entrenched that the odds of defeating them seem overwhelming.

How to Assemble a ‘Dragon’

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Mikael, his career in ruins and his gadfly magazine in jeopardy after a libel judgment, is hired by a wealthy industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), to investigate a decades-old crime. Dysfunction would be a step up for the Vanger clan, who live on a secluded island and whose family tree includes Nazis, rapists, alcoholics, murderers and also, just to prevent you from getting the wrong impression, Stellan Skarsgard, the very epitome of Nordic nastiness.

The Vangers are monstrous, with a few exceptions, but far from anomalous. The gruesome pattern of criminality that Lisbeth and Mikael uncover is a manifestation of general evil that spreads throughout the upper echelons of the nation’s economy and government. The bad apples in that family are just one face of a cruel, misogynist ruling order that also includes Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), the sadistic state bureaucrat who is Lisbeth’s legal guardian. And everywhere she and Mikael turn there are more bullying, unprincipled and abusive men.

Sexual violence is a lurid thread running through “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” and Mr. Fincher approaches it with queasy, teasing sensationalism. Lisbeth’s dealings with Bjurman include a vicious rape and a correspondingly brutal act of revenge, and there is something prurient and salacious about the way the initial assault is filmed. The vengeance, while graphic, is visually more circumspect.

And when Mikael and Lisbeth interrupt their sleuthing for a bit of nonviolent sex, we see all of Ms. Mara and quite a bit less of Mr. Craig, whose naked torso is by now an eyeful of old news. This disparity is perfectly conventional — the exploitation of female nudity is an axiom of modern cinema — but it also represents a failure of nerve and a betrayal of the sexual egalitarianism Lisbeth Salander argues for and represents.

Still, it is her movie, and Ms. Mara’s. Mr. Craig is an obliging sidekick, and the other supporting actors (notably Robin Wright as Mikael’s colleague and paramour and Donald Sumpter as a helpful detective) perform with professionalism and conviction. Mr. Fincher’s impressive skill is evident, even as his ambitions seem to be checked by the limitations of the source material and the imperatives of commercial entertainment.

There is too much data and not enough insight, and local puzzles that get in the way of larger mysteries. The story starts to fade as soon as the end credits run. But it is much harder to shake the lingering, troubling memory of an angry, elusive and curiously magnetic young woman who belongs so completely to this cynical, cybernetic and chaotic world without ever seeming to be at home in it.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Sex, violence, sexual violence.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Opens on Tuesday nationwide.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production design by Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Trish Summerville; produced by Scott Rudin, Ole Sondberg, Soren Staermose and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 38 minutes.

WITH: Daniel Craig (Mikael Blomkvist), Rooney Mara (Lisbeth Salander), Christopher Plummer (Henrik Vanger), Stellan Skarsgard (Martin Vanger), Steven Berkoff (Frode), Robin Wright (Erika Berger), Yorick van Wageningen (Bjurman), Joely Richardson (Anita Vanger), Geraldine James (Cecilia), Goran Visnjic (Armansky), Donald Sumpter (Detective Morell) and Ulf Friberg (Wennerstrom).

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Reviews

It is a beautiful example of what happens when a director finds source material that directly influences their topics of interest.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 18, 2023

Fincher’s sophisticated treatment imbues this tale of corruption, sexual assault, and trauma with a textured hand; and in addition to surpassing the Swedish versions, he gives the story new life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 1, 2023

... the American screen adaptation of the Swedish bestseller directed by David Fincher and scripted by Steve Zaillian, is a darker, richer, more compelling adaptation than the original Swedish version.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2023

The 2.5-hour runtime flies by, but you won't even notice because Mara's outstanding performance is simply that mesmerizing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2021

A cold, captivating rape revenge thriller that is more measured than its Swedish counterpart. Anchored by a stunning performance by Mara, the plot is as convoluted as its source material, but Fincher makes this eminently watchable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 12, 2021

Go see the Swedish version.

Full Review | Aug 31, 2021

The second time we see that scene, through the footage Lisbeth recorded it's taken on the characteristic of her perspective and we are revolted...

Full Review | Original Score: 88/100 | Aug 19, 2021

The result is more cohesive, and of course longer, though dedicated fans will be annoyed by departures from the books for the sake of brevity.

Full Review | Jun 11, 2021

For this particular story, Fincher's style is just too sleek.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 3, 2021

David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2020

Mara gives a compelling breakout performance as Lisbeth Salander, the goth punk cyber sleuth...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 19, 2020

For the most part, David Fincher's new adaptation is identical to the original film.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 30, 2020

An incredibly well done thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.0/4.0 | Sep 8, 2020

An inconsistent ride, but definitely one worth taking.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 11, 2020

Being maddening at all times, 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo' is a brutal, dark and visually stimulating film that, releasing a huge anxiety, is captivating by the way the sinister clings to the unexpected. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 24, 2020

Fincher has crafted a visually stunning and poetic take on Larsson's wonderful source material.

Full Review | Mar 31, 2020

Fincher's is a skilled, slick, and engrossing version of Larsson's book.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2020

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo really is a stand out film of 2011. It's one of the strongest Dramas you can see this season. It isn't for the faint of heart though

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 11, 2020

The material is tailor-made for Fincher, and, in many respects, it feels a summation of his work over the preceding 15 years.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2019

A twisty film that feels promising at first but then devolves into a sensational, lurid tale that rivals Silence of the Lambs for squirm-factor.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 24, 2019

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'Tattoo' Times Two: A Cleaner, Classier Thrill Ride

Mark Jenkins

Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander, the dark heroine of the American movie adaption of the Swedish novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . Merrick Morton/Sony Pictures hide caption

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Director: David Fincher
Genre: Thriller, Drama
Running Time: 158 minutes

Rated R for brutal violent content including rape and torture, strong sexuality, graphic nudity, language

With: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Stellan Skarsgård

Maybe they should have called it The Girl with the Dragon Tat . That would have signified how much David Fincher's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's thriller differs from the 2009 Swedish version. Which is, not much at all.

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'She's Different'

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The Hollywood remake is, of course, in English, and scripter Steven Zaillian has altered some of the details, or simply taken different ones from the novel. And Fincher, having struggled with dramatizing computer use in The Social Network , shows less of dragon-inked hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) at the keyboard and on the Net.

Otherwise, though, Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is less a reinterpretation than a reiteration. Watching this stylish but ever so slightly boring movie, viewers may wish the filmmakers had done something to outrage the book's bazillion fans. Move it to Scotland, perhaps, or lose the romance between the bisexual Lisbeth and her crime-fighting partner, the polyamorously hetero Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig).

As everyone with an interest in this movie already knows, Mikael is a crusading Stockholm journalist who just lost a libel suit brought by a malignant businessman. He decides to exit Millennium , the muckraking journal he runs with his (married) lover, Erika (Robin Wright).

Then Mikael is offered a healthy stipend to investigate a stone-cold missing-persons case. Elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) has wondered about his favorite niece, Harriet, since she vanished in 1966. He's convinced that the girl, then 16, was murdered, probably by a member of the generally loathsome Vanger clan. These include Martin (Stellan Skarsgard), the brother of the missing Harriet, and Anita (Joely Richardson), one of the few Vangers who doesn't live on a private island in frosty northern Sweden.

Mikael was vetted for the gig by unconventional sleuth Lisbeth, a pierced and tattooed goth girl who investigates people by hacking their computers. (Not their phones — the story occurs before the smartphone era.) Lisbeth and Mikael connect in a different way than in the Swedish movie, but their collaboration is otherwise familiar. Lisbeth, a part-time feminist avenger, is intrigued by what turns out to be Mikael's quest: identifying a serial killer whose female victims were murdered to Old Testament specifications.

Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, left) offers Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) a big paycheck to crack the mystery of his missing granddaughter. Sony Pictures hide caption

Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, left) offers Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) a big paycheck to crack the mystery of his missing granddaughter.

This part of the sprawling plot is basically Angels and Demons with Nazis, and Fincher doesn't seem especially committed to it. He includes the gruesome homicides, their Biblical connections and Larsson's link between today's rightists and yesterday's fascists and anti-Semites. But the film doesn't spend any more time on this silliness than needed to uphold the original plot.

Much more immediate is Lisbeth's battle against corrupt male authority, personified by her legal guardian. For reasons that most viewers will already know, the 23-year-old hacker is still a ward of the state. When her chubby new custodian (Yorick van Wageningen) sexually abuses her, Lisbeth takes violent and elaborate revenge. By comparison, her eventual showdown with a villainous Vanger is anticlimactic.

The Americanized Girl with the Dragon Tattoo looks and sounds great. It's shot in wintry tones, and driven by composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' pulses, drones and thumps, which add tension to stretches of dry exposition. But the movie's classiness actually works against it.

The Swedish version was sloppier and trashier, which suited the material. If that movie was more lurid, it also packed more genuine emotion.

Mara and Craig embody their characters with assurance and precision, but they — like the movie they're in — are a bit too cold, a little too clean. For a sleazefest like this to work, everyone needs to get into the muck.

Den of Geek

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review

David Fincher's English-language movie of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo might just be the most un-Hollywood American thriller in years. Here's our review...

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The woman who brought a lawsuit against the US distributors of the movie Drive , over what she claimed (with some justification) was its misleading promotion, can have no such qualms with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo . Championed as ‘the feel bad film for Christmas’, and with promotional materials that accurately reflect that, this is a dark, unsettling adaptation of Steig Larsson’s novel.

It’s also what happens when you let grown ups make films.

Adapted by Steven Zaillian and directed by David Fincher, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the kind of thriller that mainstream Hollywood simply doesn’t make. Yet, backed by the confidence that comes with bringing books bought by 65 million people (and counting) to the big screen, Sony appears to have not only recruited compelling film makers, it’s also let them do their job.

The result runs to over two and a half hours, and thoroughly, thoroughly earns its 18 certificate (there’s not a sniff of PG-13/12A here). It’s impossible to remember an expensive Christmas blockbuster quite like it in that regard.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo barely feels like a Hollywood thriller. And that’s for two reasons.

First, Fincher filmed large chunks of the movie on location in Sweden, and there’s a bleakness and palette that’s informed by the film’s Scandinavian locale as a result. It looks and feels frosty, in no small way thanks to just how exquisitely the movie is shot at times.

Secondly, there’s no Hollywood gloss here. The film is relentless in its uncomfortable tone, not flinching from subject matter that’s often horrific to watch. The camera never blinks, even when much of the audience is tempted to do so. Even the many who know what’s coming (and there are no story spoilers here) will struggle with how dark and nasty things get, but the film remains committed to showing it.

But it’s not dark and nasty for the sake of it. Furthermore, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is sporadically mesmerising cinema, edited astonishingly well, and at its peak, it feels that barely a frame is wasted. Fincher’s pace, and more importantly his control of it, remains – until the last 20 minutes or so – quite brilliant. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music only adds to the unnerving feel.

It’s a cold film, certainly, bearing a similarity to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in that regard. But where it differs from that movie is that there’s a slightly easier way into the story for the audience. And it comes in the shape of Daniel Craig’s Mikael Blomkvist.

Appreciating that it’s Rooney Mara’s performance as Lisbeth Salander that’s going to – with some justification – get the lion’s share of the acting plaudits (and we’ll come to her in a minute), it’s Craig’s understated turn that holds the film together.

This isn’t action-man, 007 Daniel Craig. Instead, this is the first class actor that earned the James Bond gig in the first place (think back to films such as The Mother ) His portrayal of Blomkvist – a man not short of shades of grey – is one of his quietest, most controlled, and effective pieces of work.

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Rooney Mara, though, is a revelation.

Most known to this point for the opening few minutes of Fincher’s The Social Network , Mara is terrific. Appreciating that it’s rare to find such an unusual, well-written and compelling female role in the first place, Mara doesn’t let the chance pass. An Oscar nomination is the bare minimum that’s heading her way.

Unrecognisable from her last film, she utterly owns the skin of Salander, putting together an unlikely hero to root for, whilst clearly harbouring the mental scars that she’s picked up along the way. It’s bold, risky acting, way out of most actresses’ comfort zone (and, consequently, the audience’s), and between her and Craig (the pair convincingly selling a leading pair who seemingly have very little in common), it’s hard to tear your eyes off the screen.

The irony, that said, is that beneath those performances (as well as excellent supporting turns from the likes of Stellan Skarsgard and Christopher Plummer) is actually a fairly conventional thriller, and even if you’re not familiar with the source material (confession: I wasn’t), it’s pretty straightforward after a while to put the pieces together. In fact, I’ll go further: the overriding mystery isn’t massively interesting, which explains why Fincher’s film, wisely, focuses more often on the manner of the investigation rather than the content of it.

Certainly, the members of the audience just along for a whodunnit are the ones who’ll get the least out of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo . And that’s appreciating that you’ll have to search hard to find a film that makes flicking through pictures on an Apple Mac look as exciting as it does here.

In fact, that’s one of the further strengths of the picture: the moments on paper that seem the most mundane are the ones that prove far more compelling that an action sequence in any number of Hollywood thrillers.

Still, it does eventually start to drag on a little, and that running time begins to be felt around 15 minutes from the end. It’s the only point where it all lags slightly. It’s worth noting, too, that both the narrative and approach of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are going to be understandably alienating for some.

However, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo should be commended and appreciated for what it is. It’s a mature, meticulous piece of work, better at character study than outright thrills, and a further quality film from one of America’s most compelling film makers. It’s not David Fincher’s best movie, but it feels like the best, most unsettling Hollywood thriller in a long, long time.

They weren’t kidding about it being a feel bad movie, either…

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Simon Brew | @SimonBrew

Editor, author, writer, broadcaster, Costner fanatic. Now runs Film Stories Magazine.

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The girl with the dragon tattoo: film review.

Rooney Mara gives a bewitching performance as Lisbeth Salander in the adaptation of Steig Larsson's novel, which also stars Daniel Craig.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Film Review

Girl with Dragon Tattoo Computer Film Still - H 2011

In the end, there’s not much extra even David Fincher can bring to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . This fastidious, technically stellar Hollywood telling of one of the great literary sensations of recent times is highlighted by a bewitching performance from Rooney Mara as the punked-out computer research whiz Lisbeth Salander and remains an absorbing story, as it was on the page and in the 2009 Swedish screen version.

But for all the skill brought to bear on it, the film offers no surprises in the way it’s told (aside from a neatly altered ending) and little new juice to what, for some, will be the third go-round with this investigation of the many skeletons in the closet of a powerful Swedish corporate family. Dedicated Fincher fans are likely to find this redo rather more conventional and less disturbing than Seven, Fight Club and Zodiac, all of which end far less reassuringly. Box office returns for this dark Christmas offering will certainly be big, although it will be interesting to gauge if Tattoo is still as major a part of the zeitgeist as it was a year or two ago.

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DVD & Streaming

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Drama , Mystery/Suspense

Content Caution

In Theaters

December 20, 2011
Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist; Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander; Christopher Plummer as Henrik Vanger; Stellan Skarsgård as Martin Vanger; Robin Wright as Erika Berger; Steven Berkoff as Dirch Frode; Yorick van Wageningen as Nils Bjurman; Ulf Friberg as Hans-Erik Wennerström

Home Release Date

March 20, 2012
David Fincher

Distributor

Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

Mikael Blomkvist lights a cigarette and squints at Stockholm’s steel gray sky. As the publisher of the left-leaning magazine Millennium , he should have known better than to print an unsubstantiated exposé alleging financial malfeasance by Swedish business magnate Hans-Erik Wennerström. Blomkvist’s reward? A libel verdict, a fine that wipes out his life savings and the end of his investigative journalism career.

But news of Blomkvist’s fall from grace has barely begun to spread when he receives a call from a lawyer representing another Swedish corporate legend, Henrik Vanger. The aging industrialist invites Blomkvist four hours north, to his remote and expansive private estate on Hedeby Island. Wine in hand, Vanger relates the story of a vexing mystery that’s haunted him for decades.

On Sept. 24, 1966, Henrik’s beloved 16-year-old niece, Harriet, disappeared without a trace from the family estate. He suspects someone in his family (most of whom live on the island) must have murdered Harriet—but he’s never proven it. Now Henrik believes Blomkvist can succeed where he has failed. “You will be investigating thieves, misers, bullies, the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet,” Henrik intones. “My family.”

Blomkvist immediately unearths new clues. He also realizes there’s more investigative work in the case than he can handle alone, so he asks Henrik for an assistant. The old man already has someone in mind: a young woman named Lisbeth Salander, whom he had previously hired to do a background check on Blomkvist.

Clad in black, Salander is a slight thing, a waif whose facial flesh is shot through with piercings and whose wary demeanor cloaks crazy computer-hacking skills … and an insanely dark past.

Together, Blomkvist and Salander begin to piece together what really happened that day in 1966, even as it becomes apparent that someone doesn’t want them digging up the truth. That’s because the Vanger family’s secrets prove to be more grotesque than even Henrik imagined.

Positive Elements

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo can be seen simply as an edgy— really edgy—crime thriller. But you don’t have to dig too deeply to sense that the story’s original creator, Swedish author Stieg Larsson, was also trying to make a statement about the plight of abused women. In Sweden, in fact, you don’t have to dig past the story’s title. Larsson’s original published title was not The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , but Men Who Hate Women .

Two significant story strands involve the sexual victimization of women. Such evidence surfaces in the case, and Salander herself has endured a life of abuse, assault and degradation. It’s suggested that her father was a predator, for which she set him on fire when she was still quite young. Since then, she’s been a ward of the state, deemed (unjustly so) incompetent to manage her own affairs: She must submit to the oversight of a court-appointed guardian. For years, he was a kindly older gentleman. But when he has a stroke, Salander lands in the “care” of a sadistic rapist.

Those things aren’t positive, obviously. But the film uses them to draw attention to the harsh reality that some women are very vulnerable to malevolent men, and that the crimes those men perpetrate are horrific beyond comprehension.

More straightforward is the alliance Salander forges with Blomkvist—an alliance she certifies by tending to his gunshot wound and rescuing him from certain death when he falls into the hands of a killer. Blomkvist, in turn, treats Salander with kindness and equality, two responses she’s not used to receiving from a man. So, in the end, his behavior helps soften her damaged and calloused heart.

Spiritual Elements

Blomkvist’s teenage daughter (whose presence has no real bearing on the story) has become a Christian. She wears a cross, prays before meals and is serious about her faith, going so far as rebuking her father when he’s quietly critical of her spiritual pursuits. We get the sense here that very few people in Sweden are Christians, and that someone exhibiting personal faith is considered a strange curiosity. Meanwhile, a key character at the time of Harriet’s disappearance was also interested in the Bible and Christianity.

On the flip side of the spiritual coin, Blomkvist and Salander uncover a grisly series of rape/murders, perpetrated by a Nazi who only targeted Jewish women with Old Testament names. Further, many of those women were ritualistically killed in ways that have imitative connections with words, phrases and specific sacrifices from Leviticus.

Sexual Content

Catching the eye of another woman at a dance club, Salander kisses and gropes her. The camera shows them topless in bed the next morning.

Salander eventually initiates a sexual relationship with Blomkvist as well. He asks if that’s a good idea, but doesn’t resist her unexpected advance. A lengthy and extremely graphic scene of intercourse ensues. It includes Salander’s nearly full-frontal nudity and depicts explicit sexual movements and positions. A second sex scene later is similarly unambiguous . Elsewhere, Salander’s bare breasts are shown as she showers. She’s also pictured in lingerie. We see Blomkvist in his underwear.

Salander’s background report on Blomkvist includes details about his sexual proclivities (including a mention of oral sex) and his ongoing, open affair with fellow Millennium editor Erika Berger. (It’s said to have wrecked his marriage but not hers.) At one point, Erika visits him, and we see her silhouette through a translucent window as she disrobes and invites him to bed.

Salander’s new guardian, a man named Nils Bjurman, asks her personal questions about her sex life before he assaults her the first time.

Violent Content

It’s not the only time, either. Bjurman rapes Salander twice onscreen, employing both physical force and threats to use his guardianship power to undo her life. In the second instance, he handcuffs her, knocks her out and ties her to a bed. He rips her clothes off. And the camera refuses to look away as he violates her while she struggles and screams. We see her bruises when she showers. In the first, he forces her head down for oral sex. (She vomits afterward.) Just offscreen, she manually stimulates him.

Salander ultimately retaliates by returning to Bjurman’s house, knocking him out with a stun gun and tying him to the bed. She brutalizes him anally with a steel rod, which she kicks after inserting. She forces him (and moviegoers) to watch footage of the rape. She threatens to turn him over to the authorities, but opts instead to tattoo the words “I AM A RAPIST PIG” across his chest and hang the fear of her vengeance over his head if he ever touches another woman or hurts her in any way again.

As Blomkvist and Salander’s investigation continues, they examine crime-scene photos (which we see briefly) of women’s naked and at times dismembered bodies. We also hear how another young woman (who survived) was habitually molested by both her father and brother. A flashback shows how she eventually killed her father by hitting him with a boat oar.

The killer Blomkvist is hunting eventually lures him into his private torture chamber. Gas is used to incapacitate the journalist, and he awakens with his head in a noose-like sling and his hands chained to the floor. The killer suspends him in the air and puts a plastic bag over his head.

A knife is nearly thrust into someone’s chest. A golf club is swung at a man’s mouth, knocking out teeth. A chase scene ends with an SUV crashing and exploding, killing the driver. Blomkvist’s head is grazed by a bullet; we watch Salander stitch up the bloody wound. We hear a report of someone being shot three times in the head. A man tries to steal Salander’s backpack in a train station and quickly discovers that he’s picked the wrong mark: She pursues him and gives him a savage beating to get the bag back.

Blomkvist finds a decapitated cat on his doorstep.

Crude or Profane Language

After she’s sexually assaulted the second time, Salander wears a shirt that screams, “F‑‑‑ You You F‑‑‑ing F‑‑‑.” Add a dozen or so verbal f-words to that, and one or two s-words. There are two misuses of Jesus’ name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters smoke and drink in many scenes. Salander’s problematic past includes narcotics possession.

Other Negative Elements

Salander lives by her own personal code of ethics, a code that often winks at illegal activities such as hacking people’s personal information. A postscript of sorts after the main mystery is solved involves her posing as someone else and emptying Wennerström’s bank accounts of billions of dollars. In this and her vigilante response to Bjurman, she acts as a law unto herself in the ways she seeks vengeance.

In an Esquire interview, Daniel Craig (who plays Mikael Blomkvist) said of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , “It’s as adult as you can possibly make it. This is adult drama. I grew up, as we f‑‑‑ing all did, watching The Godfather and that, movies that were made for adults. And this is a $100 million R-rated movie. Nobody makes those anymore. And [director David] Fincher, he’s not holding back. They’ve given him free rein. He showed me some scenes recently, and my hand was over my mouth, going, Are you f‑‑‑ing serious?”

Meanwhile, actress Rooney Mara, whose physical transformation for her role as Lisbeth Salander included shaving her eyebrows, getting tattoos and piercing various body parts, told Allure magazine, “I’m naked quite a lot in the movie. … Because of all the tattoos and the makeup and the piercings, and the physical transformations my body has to go through, it would always feel sort of like I was in costume, even if I was naked.”

The result of Fincher’s “free rein” and Mara’s “physical transformations” is a graphic, exceedingly violent movie that would have never gotten an R rating even 10 years ago. Based on the first book in Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (books from which have sold more than 65 million copies worldwide), this is gut-wrenching cinema, an immersion into truly grating subject matter. Writing for Entertainment Weekly , movie reviewer Owen Gleiberman says of Bjurman’s attacks on Salander, “His assaults against Lisbeth rouse us to her side, culminating in an all-out violation that Fincher stages with naked horror. When Lisbeth returns to seek vengeance, armed with scurrilous video and a tattoo gun, she’s no trumped-up action heroine; she’s operating out of hell-bent instinct. Mara acts with a quiet power—a rage chilled into silence—that is almost ghostly.”

Fincher is no stranger, of course, to dark subject matter, as evidenced by his work in the films Se7en, Zodiac and Fight Club . But The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo arguably plumbs new depths of depravity as he invites his audience to peer deeply into the human heart gone wickedly askew. I’ll let Gleiberman have the last word: “He’s an artist with the eyes of a voyeur, and he has made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo into an electrifying movie by turning the audience into addicts of the forbidden, looking for the sick and twisted things we can’t see.”

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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User reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

A journalist is aided by a young female hacker in his search for the killer of a woman who has been dead for forty years. A journalist is aided by a young female hacker in his search for the killer of a woman who has been dead for forty years. A journalist is aided by a young female hacker in his search for the killer of a woman who has been dead for forty years.

Niels Arden Oplev
Nikolaj Arcel
Rasmus Heisterberg
Stieg Larsson
Michael Nyqvist
Noomi Rapace
Ewa Fröling
344 User reviews
332 Critic reviews
76 Metascore
18 wins & 35 nominations total

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: U.S. Trailer #2

Mikael Blomkvist

Lisbeth Salander

Harriet Vanger

Erika Berger

Henrik Vanger

Martin Vanger

Nils Bjurman

Cecilia Vanger

Dirch Frode

Gustav Morell
Dragan Armanskij

Annika Giannini
Malin Eriksson
(as Sofia Ledarp)
(as Thomas Köhler)

Janne Dahlman

Hans-Erik Wennerström

Harald Vanger

Gunnar Brännlund
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Who Was Almost 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'?

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Did you know

Trivia Noomi Rapace got her motorcycle license as a preparation for the movie.
Goofs When Lisbeth Salander is sending her encrypted mail to Plague, the screen shows "decrypting" instead of "encrypting".

Mikael Blomkvist : [about Martin Vanger] For fuck's sake, Lisbeth. His father trained him to murder at age sixteen. Anyone would be sick in the head with that kind of upbringing.

Lisbeth Salander : Shut up about the victimisation! He almost killed you. He raped and murdered and he enjoyed it. He had the same chances as us to choose what he wanted to be. He was no victim. He was a sadistic motherfucker who hated women.

Alternate versions Extended/TV version runs 30 min. longer and has its aspect ratio changed to 1.78:1.
Connections Edited into Millennium (2010)
Soundtracks Ljus I Varje Hjärta Text and Music by Misen Groth (as Misen Groth)

User reviews 344

ralph_2ndedition
Feb 25, 2009
How long is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Powered by Alexa
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April 30, 2010 (United States)
Official Facebook
Official site (Spain)
Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres
Tabernas, Almería, Andalucía, Spain (Scene Australia)
Yellow Bird
ZDF Enterprises
Sveriges Television (SVT)
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$13,000,000 (estimated)
$10,095,170
Mar 21, 2010
$104,414,200

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 32 minutes
Dolby Digital

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: movie review

Swedish thriller ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ based on Stieg Larsson’s popular trilogy, turns on a murder within a tightly knit clan intent on keeping its secrets.

By Andy Klein Film critic

March 19, 2010

In “ The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ,” aging industrialist Henrik Vanger ( Sven-Bertil Taube ) hires disgraced muckraker Mikael Blomkvist ( Michael Nyqvist ) to investigate the presumed murder of his niece, Harriet, who mysteriously disappeared some 40 years earlier.

Unbeknownst to Mikael, he himself is being investigated by Lisbeth Salander ( Noomi Rapace ), a brilliant, punkish, flagrantly maladjusted hacker in her 20s.

Just as his inquiries seem to be hitting a dead end, Lisbeth anonymously e-mails the solution to his current impasse. Locating her, Mikael hires her to help him out.

Danish director Niels Arden Oplev faithfully and intelligently transfers the first volume of Stieg Larsson ’s hugely popular detective trilogy to the screen.

Most fans would agree that Larsson’s greatest accomplishment is the creation of the extraordinary and unforgettable Lisbeth.

Likewise, the key to the film’s effectiveness is the casting of Rapace, who, while not mapping quite exactly to the book’s physical descriptions, is riveting.

Grade: A- (Unrated.)

Peter Rainer, the Monitor's film critic, is on vacation this week.

More movie reviews

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

[ Editor's note : The original version of this story incorrectly stated the nationality of director Niels Arden Oplev .]

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New Fast & Furious Rival Already Has 1 Major Advantage Over $7.4 Billion Franchise

Jurassic world 4’s “new era” can fix an original steven spielberg jurassic park mistake, denzel washington's lost role in 2023 thriller prevented a perfect 30-year reunion from happening, the girl with the dragon tattoo will deliver a compelling ride for die-hard fans of the book series, dramatic thriller enthusiasts, as well as anyone who enjoys fincher's darker works..

The first installment in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Series," The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made its English debut in 2008 (the original Swedish novel was published in 2005). As the book was gaining momentum in America, production on a Swedish film adaptation from director Niels Arden Oplev and starring Noomi Rapace ( Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows ) as leading lady Lisbeth Salander, was nearing completion - and would open to critical acclaim from international and American critics alike.

As a result, it came as somewhat of a surprise that despite the success of the series, fan-favorite director, David Fincher ( The Social Network ) was gearing-up for his own adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . Fans of Oplev's film quickly dismissed Fincher's attempt as an unnecessary American cash grab - while other moviegoers anxiously awaited what the celebrated auteur would bring to his own interpretation. Now that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is officially available in theaters - can film fans just dismiss the American version or has Fincher managed to deliver yet another critical and commercial darling?

Fortunately, Fincher's interpretation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn't just a worthy adaptation of Larsson's novel - it's a beautifully shot, gripping, and disturbing film with terrific performances from nearly every actor and actress involved. While some film fans and Millennium readers might prefer the Swedish version, it's impossible to outright dismiss Fincher's film - as his Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is potentially one of the most captivating films of 2011.

Source material purists will be relieved to know that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo pulls double-duty - managing to succeed at staying true to the source material while still offering an intriguing and provocative film experience. Adaptations often have a difficult time with this balancing act and land farther on one side of the fence than the other - resulting in a chapter-by-chapter recreation (and a boring or convoluted film) or a serviceable movie experience that's too far removed from the source material (and unrecognizable to fans). Fincher once again proves he's deft at whittling a printed book down to its bare essentials (similar to his approach with Fight Club ) and presents a tremendous amount of exposition through quick onscreen cuts and smart behind-the-scenes editing. As a result, despite serving two main characters (who don't actually join forces until halfway through the film), as well as a flock of unique side-characters, Fincher manages to provide the audience with fascinating human drama and an exciting mystery throughout.

For non- Millenium series readers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo introduces the character of Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), an anti-social punk investigator/hacker type who lives paycheck to paycheck at the mercy of her state guardian - until she is pulled into a dangerous investigation by a disgraced investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig). Blomkvist has been hired by wealthy businessman Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the unsolved case of his missing niece, Harriet, who unexpectedly disappeared forty years ago. However, as the pair dig into the Vanger estate history, disgruntled family members and disturbing revelations don't just complicate the case of missing Harriet - they outright threaten Blomkvist and Salander's lives.

Film fans who haven't been following The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo production may recognize star, Rooney Mara, as Erica Albright from the opening scene in Fincher's The Social Network. Mara was responsible for one of the most captivating scenes in the " Facebook movie" but her exchange with Jessie Eisenberg is only a precursor to the physical and psychological transformation the young actress underwent to embody Lisbeth Salander - and it shows. While Daniel Craig is excellent as Blomkvist, along with a star-studded cast that includes Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, and Geraldine James, there's no doubt that Mara provides one of the most nuanced performances that movie fans will see this year (or possibly, ever). Together, Fincher and Mara don't pull any punches and thrust their Salander into some truly horrifying circumstances and Mara never falters in her depiction - even managing to keep the character grounded in some especially challenging scenes.

While the film's two hour and 38 minute run-time is likely to turn off some moviegoers who don't enjoy sitting that long for one movie in a theater, it's hard to imagine any onscreen scene or exchange that doesn't belong in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo . The movie avoids following a standard pacing structure (it includes lengthy prologue and epilogue sequences) and sometimes dwells on story elements that aren't related to the primary mystery of Harriet's disappearance. However, even Fincher's side-arc character drama manages to stay compelling - and it's unlikely that many audience members will ever find themselves bored or waiting for something to happen.

Similarly, as anyone familiar with the book series can attest, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not a simple murder-mystery that features damaged but ultimately cheery characters. The novel, as well as the 2011 film are very dark - and plumb some especially disturbing depths (think Fincher's Se7en ). In particular, one scene of sexual violence is exceptionally graphic and could be extremely disturbing to sensitive viewers. In addition, while a number of plot elements do get wrapped up, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is part of a larger trilogy - and withholds a lot of information in the interest of future installments ( The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest ). The main Vanger story comes to a sharp conclusion but less patient moviegoers will have to wait for future installments to really get to know the characters - and it's possible that some viewers will get weighed down by the bleak and claustrophobic onscreen world that Fincher and his team have created.

Given the lengthy run-time, oppressive tone, and obvious withholdings for future installments, some moviegoers could have a difficult time with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and, instead, might find a slightly less abrasive experience with the Swedish version (though Oplev's version does present similar challenges). That said, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is without question one of the most provocative films of 2011 - and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo will deliver a compelling ride for die-hard fans of the book series, dramatic thriller enthusiasts, as well as anyone who enjoys Fincher's darker works.

If you’re still on the fence about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , check out the trailer below:

[poll id="235"]

Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick - and let us know what you thought of the film below.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is now in theaters.

Our Rating:

Movie Reviews
4.5 star movies

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Review

26 Dec 2011

158 minutes

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The

"Fuck You You Fucking Fucker." The T-shirt (briefly) worn by Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel speaks volumes. First of all, it addresses the nay-sayers who thought Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 original should be left alone — not because it was any kind of cinematic masterpiece, but because the previously unknown Noomi Rapace’s centrepiece performance was deemed definitive. But it also deftly represents The Social Network director’s personality. While aspects of the media disparaged his awards-season chances against The King’s Speech last year, Fincher was already disengaged from the beauty contest and hard at work on this excellent, often pitch-dark but otherwise almost note-perfect thriller.

It was, it must be said, a weird thing to want to do: remake a European hit so soon after its original release. But Fincher’s effort is perhaps the film Larsson’s book deserved all along; it may largely be faithful to the main story, but Steven Zaillian’s economic, witty script compacts and tidies up the minor details that make the difference between a very good literary adaptation and a gripping cinematic thriller. And while Blomkvist’s labyrinthine travails reappear in the last half hour, Fincher’s film sensibly concentrates on the whodunnit element — most smartly of all, dispensing with the strange quirk of Swedish justice that allowed Blomkvist to go to jail at the very end of the original.

Instead, Blomkvist is a ruined man, and Craig is the perfect foil to the eventual, explosive arrival of The Girl. Even though everyone else seems to have a Swedish accent, however slight, Craig plays it with his own, but surprisingly the effect doesn’t jar. Bleary-eyed, stubbled and often seen in disturbingly unfashionable winceyette pyjama bottoms, Blomkvist is a low-key, effective everyman in what could easily be an overplayed, hokey story. The wonderful Christopher Plummer — excellent in Mike Mills’ Beginners too, and looking at an Oscar nomination either way — is especially delicious in this regard, inviting the writer into a story that involves “thieves, misers, bullies — the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet”. Then he adds the clincher: “My family.”

The Girl herself takes her time, and Lisbeth’s story takes a good while to bed down as Blomkvist gets to grips with the dysfunctional Vangers. And without wishing to get too caught up in comparisons with the other movie, Mara’s performance completely holds its own here. Where Rapace was aloof and flinty, Mara is more childlike and mercurial. Her actual age (withheld, for good reason, for most of the film’s running time) is hard to fathom. When she flips her hoodie she could be a 14 year-old boy; when being raped (rather graphically) by her legal guardian she could be any underage girl. But when she’s in control — which is much more satisfyingly shown here, given the age gap between herself and Blomkvist — she is most definitely a woman.

The main thing, however, is perhaps how much Fincher has grown into the role of auteur, without apparently trying or even wanting to. While it appears to be another one of Fincher’s five-finger exercises — like Panic Room or The Game — this is a film that could prove to be a key work when the big study book is written. The oily, exhilarating credit sequence suggests a knowing, Fight Club-style subversion of Craig’s 007 persona; the awkward parental bond between Blomkvist and his daughter recalls the wistful poetry of Benjamin Button; Vanger’s need for closure echoes that of Robert Graysmith in Zodiac; the film’s casual, slyly funny cyberpunk heroism makes a great counterpoint to the dry, sceptical satire of The Social Network, and the whole film is suffused with the harsh brutality of Seven.

Are there flaws? Well, arguably, in the decompressing final stretch, which relates back to the book and opens the door to the possibility/inevitability of a trilogy. But that also enables an ostensibly hard film to wind down to a surprisingly tender climax. Though Fincher professes to be a hard-ass both professionally and aesthetically — and with its not-to-be-underestimated moments of anal rape and torture, his film is not for the faint-hearted — The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo says more about broken hearts than broken people. Which, to address the nay-sayers, is where Fincher went right.

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An offbeat heroine demonstrates that appearances c

Several sequences graphically depict sexual assaul

Consensual sex and explicit sexual activity with p

English subtitles in translation from the Swedish

Apple computers, Google, Castrol, KIA.

The lead character, a young woman, smokes cigarett

Positive Messages

Despite the intense violence perpetrated by people in power, the movie's overall message is that victims of outrageous crimes and abuse can find dignity and self-respect by developing their skills and reaching inward for courage and strength.

Positive Role Models

An offbeat heroine demonstrates that appearances can be deceiving: She's pierced, tattooed, anti-social, and she smokes constantly, but Lisbeth also proves to be highly intelligent, creative, and skillful. She's willing to risk her life for her beliefs, as well as for the safety of those about whom she cares deeply. On the other hand, women are seen as victims as well as heroes.

Violence & Scariness

Several sequences graphically depict sexual assault, forced oral sex, torture, beatings, and bloody attacks. Numerous gruesome photographs of mutilated female bodies appear throughout. Characters are strangled, hung, whipped with electrical cords, drowned, and burned.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Consensual sex and explicit sexual activity with partial nudity, both male and female (breasts). Graphic sexual dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

English subtitles in translation from the Swedish include multiple use of "f--k," "motherf--ker," "bitch," "s--t," "goddamn," "whore," "c--t," "blow job," "damn," and more.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

The lead character, a young woman, smokes cigarettes non-stop. There's also some moderate social drinking in a number of scenes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) is a subtitled Swedish film that's definitely not for kids. With graphic sexual violence, gruesome murders, torture, and pervasive coarse and sexual language, even adults might be disturbed by what they see. Expect multiple images of mutilated dead young women and numerous instances of female nudity (including breasts), as well as partial male nudity in graphic tortuous poses. The female heroine smokes continuously. Still,k despite the intense content, the movie's message of good triumphing over evil ultimately provides some relief. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

Parents say (9)
Kids say (11)

Based on 9 parent reviews

Too Much For Anyone To Handle

Fabulous movie, but some hard to watch scenes. good discussion topics for older teens., what's the story.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is based on the first book in the wildy popular trilogy by journalist Stieg Larsson, published after his death. Following his conviction for libel and waiting to serve his prison term, investigative journalist Mikael Blomqvist ( Michael Nyqvist ) is hired to find the truth behind the 40-year-old disappearance of a wealthy young woman who has long been presumed murdered. He teams up with Lisbeth Salander ( Noomi Rapace ), a heavily pierced, spike-haired, and tattoed young woman with a mysterious past. Lisbeth is a misfit with a brilliant mind and masterful computer skills. She's also the current victim of a corrupt, perverted government official. In great danger themselves, Mikael and Lisbeth unearth the decades-old family tragedy and seek justice for an untold number of young women who died at the hands of racist, degenerate criminals. Those who get caught up in the story will want to continue with the sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire , though it's equally graphic.

Is It Any Good?

There's never been a character quite like Lisbeth Salander. She's intriguing, infuriating, unknowable, and ultimately sympathetic. Swedish director Niels Arden Opvel and Rapace have succeeded in bringing this unconventional young woman to life in a well-made, highly charged, and often gruesome spectacle.

Even some adults may have trouble watching the many disturbing scenes in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , which include explicit sexual assault, torture, and mayhem. And, contrary to convention, the villains are pleasant-looking, benign gentlemen of the upper classes, while the central romantic heroine is the most punked of the punk.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why filmmakers felt it necessary to be so explicit in their depictions of the crimes against Lisbeth Salander? Did it heighten your appreciation and respect for the character?

Sometimes there's a fine line between a horror film and a thriller. Did The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) cross that line? If it was enjoyable for you, what emotions did it evoke?

Lisbeth Salander is a unique character. What is an anti-hero? What other unlikely heroes or heroines do you remember from films you've seen?

Movie Details

In theaters : February 27, 2009
On DVD or streaming : July 6, 2010
Cast : Michael Nyqvist , Noomi Rapace
Director : Niels Arden Oplev
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Yellow Bird
Genre : Thriller
Run time : 152 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : disturbing violent content including rape, grisly images, sexual material, nudity and language
Last updated : May 6, 2024

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The Correct Order To Watch The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's Millennium Trilogy

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy was a huge deal in the publishing world. The books kicked off with "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" (although the book's original Swedish title was "Män som hatar kvinnor," which translates to "Men Who Hate Women"). When a book series generates as much heat as this one, the movies come calling. Sure enough, the entire original trilogy was adapted into three films in Sweden. Later, Hollywood took a stab at it, too, with English-language adaptations, but we'll get to those later. First, though, let's talk about the original trilogy and the correct order to watch it.

The correct order to watch the Millennium Trilogy

The original trilogy kicks off with 2009's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Michael Nyqvist as reporter Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as troubled goth hacker Lisbeth Salander. The two end up working together to solve the mystery of a missing girl and catch a serial killer. The story then continues with "The Girl Who Played with Fire," also released in 2009. In this sequel, Lisbeth is on the run after being accused of murder. Finally, there's "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," released in — you guessed it! — 2009. In this capper to the trilogy, Lisbeth goes on trial for murder while journalist Mikael Blomkvist tries to gather evidence for her defense.

So what's the correct order to watch this trilogy? Honestly, I won't try to get fancy here: watch them in order. While the first film can stand on its own, parts 2 and 3 are very much telling a continual story — the events of "The Girl Who Played with Fire" lead directly into "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest." So your best bet is to watch the films back-to-back in order, starting with "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," continuing with "Fire," and concluding with "Hornets' Nest."

What about the other Dragon Tattoo movies?

"But wait!" you're saying right about now. "Weren't there some other movies based on this series?" You are correct! In 2011, we got the American remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," directed by David Fincher and starring Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. In my humble opinion, it's better than the Swedish version. Sadly, Fincher and company were not given the opportunity to continue the trilogy, even though the film was a box office hit, hauling in $232.6 million on a $90 million budget. That's mighty impressive considering the movie is rather bleak and violent.

Rather than continue with the original trilogy, Sony waited a few years and rebooted things with 2018's "The Girl in the Spider's Web." This film isn't based on a book from Stieg Larsson's original trilogy — by the time the Millennium series became an international hit, Larsson had died from a heart attack. Rather than let the franchise end with Larsson's death, the books continued under new author David Lagercrantz (Karin Smirnoff would eventually write an additional book in the series).

Lagercrantz wrote "The Girl in the Spider's Web," which became the basis for the 2018 film that saw Claire Foy take over as Lisbeth Salander and Sverrir Gudnason as Mikael Blomkvist. In all honesty, "The Girl in the Spider's Web" is a complete dud. It's surprisingly boring, and audiences weren't interested — the film flopped. While I recommend watching Fincher's "Dragon Tattoo" on its own, you can feel free to skip "Spider's Web" entirely, unless you're a completist.

The 15 Best Movies Like 'Se7en' For More Psychological Horror

"Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny?"

Se7en is such a dark and effective crime thriller that it's very easy to overlook how silly the title is, given it replaces a "v" with a "7," and so is seemingly pronounced " Sesevenen ." It was arguably David Fincher 's first great film, and has a plot that follows two detectives going after a dangerous serial killer who appears to be committing a series of murders that are each based on one of the seven deadly sins.

It's the sort of movie that's proved to be influential and remarkably popular in the years since its release (even getting a 4k remaster ), and at the same time, it's possible to see certain titles released before Se7en as influencing it and its dark neo-noir narrative. The following movies all have certain similarities to Fincher's 1995 film and are worth checking out for fans of dark, twist-filled, and sometimes stomach-churning crime, thriller, and mystery movies .

15 'Zodiac' (2007)

Directed by david fincher.

David Fincher has numerous movies that could be classified as psychological thrillers, but of them all, 2007's Zodiac is probably the one that's most comparable to Se7en . This is because narratively speaking, each follows a group of characters (two detectives in Se7en , and three different men in Zodiac ) as they desperately search for an elusive killer who's at large, and terrifying thousands – if not millions – of people in the process.

Of course, Se7en is fictitious, while Zodiac is based on a real-life case, and follows people who really did try and locate the infamous Zodiac Killer in and around San Francisco. It's an incredibly compelling crime movie, and though it has similarities to Se7en , it ultimately becomes something quite different in its final act , given it chooses to explore obsession and the damage one can do when pursuing something too relentlessly. All in all, Zodiac is a massively compelling crime movie .

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14 'The Silence of the Lambs' (1991)

Directed by jonathan demme.

For as great as Se7en is, it ultimately has some tough competition when it comes to naming the best American crime/mystery movie of the 1990s, seeing as that decade also saw the release of The Silence of the Lambs . It's an amazingly well-written movie, impeccably acted, and perhaps the best film or TV series yet to feature the character of Hannibal Lecter.

He's played here by Anthony Hopkins in arguably the actor's most well-known performance, with the plot centering around a young FBI agent ( Jodie Foster ) forming an uneasy alliance with a captive Lecter, who may be able to give her assistance in catching another killer who's at large. Beyond the writing and acting, it's also hard to fault the directing, visuals, music... and everything about The Silence of the Lambs , really. It's just great all around, and one of the very best movies of the 1990s .

The Silence of the Lambs

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13 'Insomnia' (2002)

Directed by christopher nolan.

Insomnia might well be the most underrated movie directed by Christopher Nolan , with it sitting between two other films of his – Memento in 2000, and Batman Begins in 2005 – that are more well-known. It's more comparable to the former than the latter, being a psychological thriller about losing one's grip on reality while also investigating a murder. Funnily enough, it's probably one of the least mind-bending and most comprehensible movies Nolan's directed .

It might not be as popular as other Nolan movies, due to it feeling a little more straightforward than some of his twistier, more mind-bending movies, and because he didn't have a writing credit on the film either. But it is an engaging and well-made crime/thriller that scratches the same itch Se7en does , and also boasts a great cast that includes Al Pacino , Robin Williams , and Hilary Swank .

12 'Gone Girl' (2014)

Another unpredictable thriller directed by David Fincher, Gone Girl might not be as brutally dark as Se7en , but it still manages to be pretty surprising. It's about a man who comes under scrutiny from the media and the law after his wife suddenly vanishes, with some believing that he could've murdered her, with him maintaining his innocence all the while.

To say more about the plot would undo much of what makes Gone Girl great, and even though it's nearly 10 years old and is based on an even older book, it still contains secrets worth keeping. Perhaps that's one of the best things one could say about a thriller, ensuring Gone Girl's a great one. By 2014, Fincher had proven he could essentially make great psychological thriller and mystery movies in his sleep , with Gone Girl being yet another indicator that few directors can tackle the genre as well as him.

11 'Saw' (2004)

Directed by james wan.

Having a one-word title that begins with "S" isn’t the only commonality shared between Se7en and Saw . The latter seems to have taken a decent amount of inspiration from the former, especially with so much of the 2004 film functioning like a police procedural. Of course, a good chunk of the sequels doubled down on the torture/psychological mind-game side of things, upping the amount of on-screen carnage considerably.

But the original Saw was mostly concerned with tension and a consistent sense of unease, centering on two men trapped in a terrible situation and the steps taken by a determined detective who wants to take down the mysterious figure who might be responsible for holding the two men captive. The film’s writer, Leigh Whannell , was upfront about taking inspiration from Se7en , and it should be noted that Saw still does enough to stand on its own and not feel entirely derivative .

10 'Cure' (1997)

Directed by kiyoshi kurosawa.

A blend of crime, mystery, and horror genres that’s particularly loved on Letterboxd , Cure is a movie about a desperate and perhaps even futile search for answers behind a series of killings in Japan. Bucking the trend of many comparable horror/crime movies, there isn’t a single human culprit, because the various murders all have different perpetrators, and none of them seem to remember committing the oddly similar crimes in question.

Cure features a detective and psychologist tasked with looking into the entire strange case, and it therefore understandably functions well as a work of psychological horror. It’s also a film defined by how intense and unnerving the atmosphere throughout is , and everything adds up to a distinctive and dark film that’s ultimately as gripping as it is inevitably grim.

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9 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (2011)

Another intense movie by David Fincher , The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo saw the director taking on a particularly chilly story adapted from the Swedish novel of the same name. It is more focused on being a crime/thriller movie than it is a work of horror. In fact, outside some confronting scenes, it wouldn’t really feel right to call The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a horror movie; more just a thriller that sometimes gets horrifying when it comes to content.

It pairs a journalist with a hacker, both working together to uncover an alarming series of events related to a disappearance that was first reported decades in the past . The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo unfolds over a rather long runtime of over 2.5 hours, but mostly earns that kind of length and stays compelling throughout.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

8 'the exorcist iii' (1990), directed by william peter blatty.

In contrast to something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , The Exorcist III is a mystery/horror movie that certainly emphasizes horror, but retains something of a crime-focused feel with a story about uncovering a serial killer. It does fit within the overall Exorcist series, but the narrative at hand helps it feel distinguished from the original film, and the other (generally less high-quality) entries in the series.

The Exorcist III revolves around Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, who was a supporting character in the first movie, and how he goes to great lengths to uncover the truth behind the infamous Gemini Killer. It’s certainly a slow burn, as far as mystery movies go, but it combines a well-executed plot with plenty of memorable scares to make for a surprisingly good sequel, and certainly the best Exorcist movie that isn’t the 1973 original .

The Exorcist III

7 'collateral' (2004), directed by michael mann.

While Se7en is mostly concerned with the people trying to catch a serial killer, Collateral forces viewers to go along with a man who kills frequently and without remorse, working as an assassin. Similarly, the film’s other main character, a cab driver, is made to go along with this violent lifestyle for a while, too, with the assassin seeking his assistance in getting from one location to the next.

It unfolds over a short period of time, keeping the tension high throughout and serving as a great character study for both men. Jamie Foxx is reliably good as the cab driver, but Tom Cruise's villainous turn is perhaps the most surprising part of the movie, playing the killer shockingly well , especially considering the actor doesn’t take on purely antagonistic roles all that often (though he’s very good at it, as Collateral shows).

6 'I Saw the Devil' (2010)

Directed by kim jee-woon.

There's no shortage of great South Korean thrillers out there, especially within the past couple of decades. Of them all, I Saw the Devil is easily one of the best, and arguably one of the most extreme, too, with its dark story about a secret agent who goes to drastic lengths to track down and get revenge on a notorious serial killer after his fiancé is found murdered.

Once the plot really gets going, I Saw the Devil plays out like a constant – and ferocious – nightmare, going from one violent, stomach-churning scene to the next, all building up to an alarming climax. It's a truly horrifying movie – perhaps one of the darkest, bleakest, and grittiest crime movies released in recent memory. Indeed, it's one that might prove too extreme for some, but for those wanting something even darker and more intense than Se7en , it may be worth checking out .

I Saw the Devil

5 'nightcrawler' (2014), directed by dan gilroy.

Like Se7en , Nightcrawler is also classifiable as a neo-noir movie , and goes to some extremely dark places, though has an overall very different premise. It follows a man named Lou Bloom, and the increasingly desperate lengths he'll go to for the purposes of capturing crime scene footage that he can then sell to a news station.

It's a movie that's unafraid to play out with a cast of very flawed characters, and it certainly has an overall pessimistic attitude toward the media and perhaps humanity as a whole. Despite this, Nightcrawler is incredibly engaging and well-paced, and for being such a bleak yet stylish and breakneck movie, it'll likely appeal to those who liked Se7en . As a character study of a particularly dangerous man - played with immense success by the always dedicated Jake Gyllenhaal - it's gripping stuff.

Nightcrawler

4 'vengeance is mine' (1979), directed by shōhei imamura.

A Japanese crime film that would've felt even more shocking when it was first released in the late 1970s, Vengeance Is Mine is an underrated movie centered around a serial killer. Said killer's name is Iwao Enokizu, and the movie presents his exploits in a very matter-of-fact way that arguably stands to make his on-screen crimes even more disturbing, making this a phenomenal Japanese movie that, while not super famous, does have a good level of acclaim to its name.

He's also constantly on the run throughout the movie, with the police always on his tail and attempting to put a stop to his violent crime spree. That whole dynamic – and the brutality of the film – gives it some similarities to Se7en , though Vengeance Is Mine does admittedly stand out for making the killer the main character , given things are shown primarily from his point of view.

3 'Prisoners' (2013)

Directed by denis villeneuve.

Given he also starred in the aforementioned Zodiac and Nightcrawler , Jake Gyllenhaal seems to be an actor who's well-suited to dark crime/thriller movies. He also stars in Prisoners alongside Hugh Jackman , with this 2013 film being about a father going to desperate lengths to find his young daughter after she goes missing one day.

It was directed by Denis Villeneuve , who's no stranger to dark psychological thrillers (at least when he's not directing sci-fi blockbusters like Blade Runner 2049 and Dune ). He's also no stranger to directing some of the best movies in recent memory, especially throughout the 2010s. Prisoners is a movie that keeps the tension high throughout, is emotionally intense, and is willing to explore some dark themes while telling a story that sees its characters go to similarly dark places.

2 'Memories of Murder' (2003)

Directed by bong joon-ho.

Bong Joon-ho 's Memories of Murder was not the acclaimed director's first film, but it was the first movie of his to get significant attention on an international scale. It's one of the best films the South Korean director's ever made, which is truly saying something given the high quality of his work over the past couple of decades.

Memories of Murder has a narrative inspired by true events, and follows two detectives investigating a series of brutal murders in Hwaseong during the 1980s. As far as crime movies go, it's up there with some of the bleakest, but the hopelessness and desperation of the narrative and its characters is largely what makes Memories of Murder so impactful and ultimately memorable. As far as South Korean crime movies go, Memories of Murder is easily one of the very best.

Memories of Murder

1 'the house that jack built' (2018), directed by lars von trier.

There are plenty of shocking and disturbing movies directed by Lars von Trier , with 2018's The House That Jack Built arguably being his most confronting, at least when it comes to violence. It's an unflinching look at the life (and mind) of a serial killer named Jack, as he revisits a series of grisly crimes he committed over a 12-year period.

The movie has a very dark sense of humor at times, but not to the point where it ever diminishes the horror inherent within the story it tells. The House That Jack Built is an incredibly interesting and disquietingly engrossing movie , and certainly pushes the boundaries as far as crime/thriller movies go. Like I Saw The Devil , it's probably only recommendable to people who felt they could handle something like Se7en reasonably well. In fact, it's even possible to argue that The House That Jack Built is somehow even darker.

The House That Jack Built

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When Salander finally answers Frode's question about Blomkvist's private life: Salander: He's had a long-standing sexual relationship with his co-editor of the magazine. It wrecked his marriage but not hers. (Beat.) (looking straight at Frode) Sometimes he performs cunnilingus. (cut to Armansky shutting his eyes in embarrassment) Salander: Not often enough, in my opinion. (Armansky fidgets and covers his mouth with his hand) Frode: (completely unbothered and matter-of-fact) No, you were right not to include that. Salander: (looks away) I know.
Introducing Stockholmers' dislike of the cold small town, Blomkvist arrives in Hedestad in the middle of a snowstorm. Frode: First time in Hedestad? Blomkvist: And the last. Frode: Oh, don't say that. It's lovely in the spring. Blomkvist: You said it would be lovely in the winter. Frode: Well, this is unseasonable. Blomkvist: Well, I'll be on the 4:30 train back to Stockholm. Frode: Unless we get snowed in. (Blomkvist gives him a glare) Frode: I'm joking.
Henrik Vanger's deadpan way of summing up his brother Richard's life: Henrik: Anyway, Richard died a martyr to the Nazi cause in 1940. Missed all the real excitement, but not the opportunity to regularly beat his wife Margareta and their son Gottfried.
When Henrik explains the layout of Hedeby Island to a freezing Blomkvist, who is trying to take notes in the snow and wind: Henrik: Your closest neighbour is my brother Harald. Another Nazi, if you can believe. Two in the family. Oh yes, he is quite detestable, to put it nicely. But, you'll probably never see him, he's a recluse. Blomkvist: He was there that day? Henrik: Indeed, he was. Eh, his daughter Cecilia lives over there. They don't speak. Blomkvist: Does anybody speak to anybody on this island? Henrik: Actually, Isabella, Harriet's mother, who lives there, she speaks to Harald. Which is one of the reasons I don't speak to her. Blomkvist: Right. Henrik: Cecilia's brother, Birger, lives over there. Blomkvist: Who doesn't he speak to? Henrik: You, probably. But you wouldn't want him to, he can be just as unpleasant as Harald. Blomkvist: Quickly losing track of who's who here. Henrik: (laughs) How you'd wish it were always so. Soon you will know us all only too well, with my apologies. Now, out there - my grandnephew Martin's house, Harriet's brother. Blomkvist: Who speaks to him? Henrik: I speak to him.
Blomkvist gripes about the inconvenience of travel to Hedestad during his dinner with Martin Vanger and Liv: Martin: I came in a little later after the accident on the bridge with the 4:30 train. Blomkvist: (grunts) I know it well.
When Erika Berger arrives in Hedestad: (Blomkvist walks up to Berger's car and she opens the driver's side window halfway) Berger: Is it any warmer inside? Blomkvist: (with a slight smirk) No. (Berger gives a pained expression and rolls the window back up)
Birger Vanger is given only an extremely small role in the movie, half of which is being mocked in his absence by Henrik and Martin: Henrik: You know, I used to be in the newspaper business - we owned six dailies back in the 50s. Martin: We still own one. The Courier here in town. Henrik: Which I let my nephew Birger run because he can't run anything else.
Martin pokes fun at Millennium 's financial difficulties after its battle with Wennerström: Blomkvist: Excuse me, did I - did I - did I miss something? Henrik: We were talking about investing in the magazine. Blomkvist: Well, I gathered that, but why would you want to... Martin: Well, not out of greed, that's for sure.
When Blomkvist sees the framed portraits on his wall, he takes the chance to brag that he took them... and they are of prominent Swedish Nazis. Harald: Sven Olov Lindholm... note There is an Easter Egg here for viewers familiar with the Swedish far-right - Lindholm actually renounced fascism and racism in the 1970s and became active in pacifist, environmentalist and left-wing politics. This understandably alienated him from former comrades in the far-right, who viewed him as a traitor (it even wrecked his marriage), so it is strange for Harald, as inveterate an antisemite and fascist in his old age as before, to still keep a photo of him in his far-right pantheon in 2006. The implication is that either Harald is so isolated from the world that he didn't even know about a major event in his own political circles from decades ago , making his "I'm not a recluse" line even more hilarious, or he is so obsessed with his ego and supposed photographic genius that he kept the portrait anyway. Me! Blomkvist: Handsome. Harald: Birger Furugård. Me! Beat Harald: (trailing off and losing interest) Per Engdahl.
Soon after they sit down, he produces a leering query to find out if Blomkvist is Jewish (or of Jewish descent): Harald: "Blom-", or... Bloom ? Blomkvist: Blomkvist.
Within a few sentences, he goes from complaining about his family's predictable reaction to his behaviour to a hilarious egotrip: Harald: I am not a recluse. I don't close my door to anybody. They just don't visit. Blomkvist: Well... perhaps if you redecorated. Harald: Hide the past like they do? Under a thin, shiny veneer? Like an IKEA table? I am the most honest of all of them. Blomkvist: (off-handedly, looking through the pictures) The family? Harald: Sweden. (Blomkvist looks up incredulously )

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Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Series Reboot Update Given by Showrunner

T he Girl With the Dragon Tattoo TV reboot has received an exciting update following last year's announcement that the planned project is currently in development at Amazon MGM Studios. The reboot was announced over three years ago.

In an interview with ScreenRant , series showrunner Veena Sud expressed her excitement over bringing Stieg Larsson's best-selling psychological thriller novels to television.

"I have a classic television show coming out for Amazon, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another angry woman out to get the bad guys and the monsters. So, I’m really excited about that, bringing it to television after 15–20 years," said Sud.

She continued, "It’s been kind of in the stratosphere, and there’s so much to talk about today that was relevant back then — when Stieg Larsson first published the books, the trilogy — about female rage, about abuse, about the emergence of racism, white nationalism. All of the things, 20 years later, here we are, it’s super relevant today. So far, just pursuing kind of outlier women has always been the thing I love, so I’m really excited about that."

What to expect in the new Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

While Sud couldn't reveal much about the upcoming series reboot of the popular franchise, she welcomes fans and a new generation of viewers to "female rage," saying that the series will introduce "a new version of a woman who just refuses to follow the rules."

Nothing much has been revealed yet about the series reboot aside from the comments Sud has provided, but it was previously reported that the show will be a standalone story about Lisbeth Salander.

Best known as the "Millennium Trilogy," Larsson first released the first installment in 2005. The book then spawned two sequels, including The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. The novel series has also inspired a slew of movies and television shows, such as the 2009 No omi Rapace -led feature, the 2010 English remake starring Rooney Mara , and the critically panned The Girl in the Spider's Web, among others.

The post Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Series Reboot Update Given by Showrunner appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More .

COMMENTS

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie review (2011)
The success of the heroine Lisbeth Salander suggests a hunger in audiences for an action picture hero who is not a white 35ish male with stubble on his chin. Such characters are often effective, but they sometimes seem on loan from other films. There are few characters anywhere like Salander, played here by Rooney Mara and by Noomi Rapace in the original 2009 Swedish picture. Thin, stark ...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
John D Amazing plot, acting, and themes. Highlights the dark nature of the world, but also gives a little hope Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 05/02/24 Full Review Taylor H A difficult ...
'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Directed by David Fincher. Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller. R. 2h 38m. By A. O. SCOTT. Dec. 19, 2011. Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is ...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one. Full Review | Dec 29, 2020.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Directed by David Fincher. With Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for 40 years by young computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011 film)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a 2011 mystery thriller film based on the 2005 novel by Swedish writer Stieg Larsson.It was directed by David Fincher with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian.Starring Daniel Craig as journalist Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, it tells the story of Blomkvist's investigation to find out what happened to a girl from a wealthy family who ...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) It's hard to just take this movie straight up--it's a very close and really excellent remake of an excellent and probably slightly more incisive Swedish original movie by the same name, and based on a book (three books actually) that a lot of people have read. But in one sentence, let me try.
Movie Review
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Director: David Fincher. Genre: Thriller, Drama. Running Time: 158 minutes. Rated R for brutal violent content including rape and torture, strong sexuality ...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Review
Ultimately, it's Fincher's third best movie about a serial killer. But as Se7en and Zodiac are two truly exceptional films, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo remains an excellent movie, with a ...
Review: 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a measured and ...
David Fincher's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," however, is a top-notch thriller that looks likely to give Niels Arden Oplev's original a run for its money, even among its fans.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review
Reviews The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo review. David Fincher's English-language movie of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo might just be the most un-Hollywood American thriller in years.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Film Review
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: Film Review. Rooney Mara gives a bewitching performance as Lisbeth Salander in the adaptation of Steig Larsson's novel, which also stars Daniel Craig.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, ruthless computer hacker Lisbeth ...
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Review
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Review. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is hired by aged tycoon Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to look into the 40 year-old disappearance of a ...
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Positive Elements. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo can be seen simply as an edgy—really edgy—crime thriller. But you don't have to dig too deeply to sense that the story's original creator, Swedish author Stieg Larsson, was also trying to make a statement about the plight of abused women.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Movie Review
Parents need to know that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the English-language remake of the Swedish hit from 2009, which like this film, was also based on the best-selling Stieg Larsson novel.Like the previous versions of the story, it has very strong violence, including horrifying rape scenes, torture, and highly disturbing crime scene photos. . There's also a mangled dead cat, guns and ...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Directed by Niels Arden Oplev. With Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Sven-Bertil Taube. A journalist is aided by a young female hacker in his search for the killer of a woman who has been dead for forty years.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: movie review
By Andy Klein Film critic. March 19, 2010. In " The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ," aging industrialist Henrik Vanger ( Sven-Bertil Taube) hires disgraced muckraker Mikael Blomkvist ( Michael ...
'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' Review
Fortunately, Fincher's interpretation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn't just a worthy adaptation of Larsson's novel - it's a beautifully shot, gripping, and disturbing film with terrific performances from nearly every actor and actress involved. While some film fans and Millennium readers might prefer the Swedish version, it's impossible ...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, as you'd expect, rubbish, but the word is slightly too kind. The David Fincher film (like the very similar Swedish one - released in the US just last year! - and the book) is not even good rubbish. Read More. By Kyle Smith FULL REVIEW. See All 41 Critic Reviews.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Review
The Girl herself takes her time, and Lisbeth's story takes a good while to bed down as Blomkvist gets to grips with the dysfunctional Vangers. And without wishing to get too caught up in ...
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) Movie Review
Swedish director Niels Arden Opvel and Rapace have succeeded in bringing this unconventional young woman to life in a well-made, highly charged, and often gruesome spectacle. Even some adults may have trouble watching the many disturbing scenes in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which include explicit sexual assault, torture, and mayhem.
The Correct Order To Watch The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's ...
Nordisk Film. The original trilogy kicks off with 2009's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," starring Michael Nyqvist as reporter Mikael Blomkvist and Noomi Rapace as troubled goth hacker Lisbeth ...
15 Best Movies Like 'Se7en'
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo unfolds over a rather long runtime of over 2.5 hours, but mostly earns that kind of length and stays compelling throughout. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) / Funny
When Salander finally answers Frode's question about Blomkvist's private life: Introducing Stockholmers' dislike of the cold small town, Blomkvist arrives in Hedestad in the middle of a snowstorm. Henrik Vanger's deadpan way of summing up his …
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Series Reboot Update Given by Showrunner
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo TV reboot has received an exciting update following last year's announcement that the planned project is currently in development at Amazon MGM Studios. The reboot ...