I am a huge fan of European films, be it the German Expressionism, Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Polish Film School, Dogme 95, or Romanian New Wave to name a few. ‘The Girl with A Dragon Tattoo’ combined a mixture of Portuguese Cinema Novo for its visual looks and with a touch of Czechoslovak New Wave for its storyline. This film: a guy who is under attacked after entangling himself into the investigation on the missing niece, that leads to the unsolved murder-case – reminded me a lot of an Argentinian film, ‘El Aura’(2005) directed by Fabián Bielinsky, in terms of the story pacing, the looks and as well as the protagonist characterization.

The story is paced using the non-classical narrative form giving it a sense of realism to the setups- which is less predictable. The setups divide the back-story of the protagonist from the mentor (although this mentor is not a typical old character): she is very wise as a computer hacker herself that she can be count as one. The pacing that it takes to discover the connections of these two characters takes a lot longer than the commercial-3-Point- Structure Model. Some audience might reject this notion, but for those who enjoy subtlety and the passion to discover might love this setups.

As much European this movie could be, it still projects the commercial style in it. The scene that I am referring to is when Mikael Blomkvist ( the imprisoned journalist) is gathering information about the case through his laptop- we can see the fast-cutting images overdrawn on the screen on top of the typography merging in, forcing bundle of information. And if that is not enough, the visuals do come with the audio commentary in explaining the family tree. Yet, I wonder why I have to rewind the scene 3 times in order to digest these information during my first viewing. My take in this- it digested away my film experience.

But who can forget the tormenting, torturing sexual scenes done by the villain to the victim and later revenged by the victim back to the villain. The combination of the tether, the hidden camera, chained-smoking and the improvised taser: the electro- shocked- weapon might give you the idea of how jarring the scenes turned up.

Directed by: Niels Arden Oplev
based on Stieg Larsson’s novel
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube

My Vote: 7.5/10