FargoReviews.com

Now showing at the Fargo Theatre is a Scandinavian film by Niels Arden Opely, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. A production of the film industries of all three Scandanavian countries, the screenplay, by Nikolau Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, is based on the novel by Steig Larsson.  In some ways, the film is similar to the recently departed Ghostwriter by  super director Roman Polanski.  The genre is similar, is not exactly the same, being a mystery/adventure/mild horror film,but the main similarity is the absolute high quality  graces every part of the film, from the script to the casting to the acting to the scenarios abd on and on.

The story itself involves a disgraced investigative newspaper reporter Mikael Blomqvist, played by Michael Nyqvist, is asked by the patriarch of the Vandrr family Henrik Vander, played by Sven Bertil Taube to investigate the decades old disappearance of his daughter.  The real sleuthing and mysterious danger begins when Blomqvist’s computer acount is hijacked by professional hacker by Lizbeth Salander. played by Naomii Rapace in the title role.  Lizbeth is on another assignment as well as being a parolee from an asylum for he criminally insane and is a young leather clad woman with many body piercings.  Plots. subplots, unusual connections abound, and one wonders if all these things are connected and  as the plot threads come together and back apart again, one wonders if this is Stephen King, in which they won’t make sense in the end, or Alfred Hitchcock, in which case they will.  To find out, you’ll have to see the movie:  I’m not going to tell you.

It should be obvious by now that I found the film riveting.  The visual film quality is exquisite and eery part, even the smallest,is played well and to the hilt by the actor in each and every case.  Except for a couple of scenes, the movie is filmed in Stockholm and on a nearby island.  One of the reasons I go to movies is to be transplanted to a place and/or situation that I normally could not experience.  Stockholm is not shown in detail, but one gets the general idea.

If you liked Alfred Hitchcock and wouldn’t mind a bit more adult action, then I think you’ll like this one.  Romance and action packed CGI are absent.