Last night I watched "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". It's not the one about to hit American screens, but the Swedish one made a few years ago. It's subtitled. We might need a dual review after seeing the English language version. I have not read the book but I did read a fairly long plot synopsis and the Swedish version seems to follow it fairly closely. Steig Larson was a strange writer, apparently deeply effected by having witnessed a rape as a kid, he seems to have been left for a need for revenge. He also was a fairly dedicated communist and his attitude about corporations comes out quite clearly. All this flows into the story. Some people have labeled this as a revenge or torture porn movie, but I would not because the nastiness that happens (a lot of it) is an elemental part of the plot. It also aroused a lot of anger in that it burst the bubble of the engineered "nice" culture of Sweden and aired a lot of dirty cultural linen.
Suffice to say, it's dark, grisly and intense....not a movie for my wife. It's Bergman without restraint, full of laconic Swedish angst and just-below-the-surface violence. The settings are physically dark, full of long dark nights and austere scenery. The subtitles are quite good. Having been raised around Swedes, I recognize much of the speech and can tell (without being able to accurately translate) that not much is missing in the dialog. I am interested to see how the new version is, but I think it will have to go a long way to tell this story in a more seemingly authentic Swedish way. This movie along with the second and third installments (which I have not seen yet) are available to stream on Netflix.
