In a sentenceCraig squints at forty-year-old photographs while Mara does the actual work, and somehow it grips
Stockholm, and a snowbound island in the north of Sweden. Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), a journalist at the magazine Millennium, has just lost a libel case against the industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström (Ulf Friberg), and his reputation with it. Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), the ageing head of a family firm, hires him to find out what happened to his niece Harriet, who vanished from the family’s island forty years ago; every birthday since, someone has sent Henrik a pressed flower. Blomkvist moves into a draughty cottage on the island among the Vangers, including the courteous Martin (Stellan Skarsgård). Meanwhile Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a pierced, near-silent researcher at a security firm, is a ward of the state whose new guardian, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), controls her money.
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
Fincher’s version of Stieg Larsson’s thriller is cold, expert and for two hours properly gripping, with Rooney Mara giving it a centre. The mystery is routine and the film runs on for a good twenty-five minutes after solving it.
David Fincher’s version of Stieg Larsson’s novel arrives two years after the Swedish one, and the obvious question is why. The answer, for the first two hours, is that Fincher does this better than almost anyone. Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) loses a libel case, is hired by the old industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to find out what happened to a niece who vanished forty years ago, and goes north to a frozen island full of relatives who would rather he had not come. Steven Zaillian’s screenplay strips the book to that spine. What is left is a handsome, cold, mostly gripping 158 minutes with a routine mystery at its centre and an ending that will not sit down.
Rooney Mara is the reason to see it. Her Lisbeth Salander has bleached eyebrows, a ring through her lip and hair shaved at the sides, and she speaks as if every word costs her money. She does not look at people; she looks at their screens. Mara plays her as someone who decided long ago that nothing good arrives from other people, and we read a great deal into a face that gives almost nothing away. The scenes with her state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen), are the hardest in the film. We watched them with our stomach tight, and we were grateful that Fincher stages them as horror and not as spectacle. Van Wageningen plays Bjurman as a dull man in a cardigan, which is worse than a monster.
Jeff Cronenweth shoots Sweden in the blue-grey of a winter afternoon that never quite becomes day. Snow is white only in the distance; up close it is dirty and lit by sodium lamps. Donald Graham Burt puts Blomkvist in a guest cottage where he works in his coat, and puts Martin Vanger (Stellan Skarsgård) in a glass box of a house on the shore, all polished floors and nothing to hide behind. Trish Summerville dresses Salander in hoodies, black leather and a T-shirt with an obscenity on it, and dresses the Vangers in cashmere that has cost more than her flat.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross open with a thrash through Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” over titles of black oil and wires, then spend the rest of the film on drones and pianos that seem to be playing in another room. It works; the whole film hums with unease. Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall cut the two investigations against each other for the first hour, Blomkvist with his photographs and card index, Salander with her laptop, so that when the two finally meet it feels like two halves of one mind. Those stretches, of people reading and thinking, are the best-edited in the film.
The mystery itself is the weak part. It turns on a man enlarging old photographs and a woman searching databases, and each answer arrives on schedule with a small chime of recognition. Craig is fine, tired and decent, but he makes no attempt at an accent while everyone around him does, and the film never accounts for it. Plummer is warm and sly and Skarsgård is courteous. Robin Wright, as Blomkvist’s editor and lover Erika Berger, is given about six lines.
Then there is the ending. The film solves its central puzzle and then continues for something like twenty-five minutes, tying off the Wennerström business from the opening in a sequence of wigs, banks and airports. We looked at our watch, which we had not done once in the preceding two hours, and then we were irritated with the film for making us do it.
Fincher has done this before and done it better. Zodiac (2007) was also about obsessives sifting old paper in bad light, and it was braver, because it admitted the answer might never come. This is still a well-made, unsettling evening, and Mara is worth it on her own; just do not expect the second half to match the first, and be aware the 18 certificate is earned. The story takes a turn we will not describe, but you will guess where it is going a good while before Blomkvist does.
Most critics lean positive, but only just, respecting the film more than loving it. The praise gathers in the same places: Rooney Mara’s Salander, which nearly every critic names as the film’s strongest element, and Fincher’s controlled, frosty visual style. Several single out Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score for its steady dread, and a few credit the screenplay with tightening the novel’s sprawl. Her scenes with Daniel Craig are noted for their charge.
The reservations cluster around temperature. Critic after critic finds the film cold, its mystery conventional and neatly resolved, its closing stretch too long, and its existence hard to justify so soon after the Swedish version. The spread is wide: Digital Spy gives it full marks, while the Los Angeles Times and Eye for Film sit near the bottom. Kenneth Turan is the rare dissenter on Mara, calling her Salander a stunt rather than a character, and Vulture finds the performance merely functional.
Wise calls it an excellent, hard-edged thriller and a key work in Fincher’s career. He particularly praises Rooney Mara’s performance and the way the screenplay tightens the novel’s story.
Read the full review →Tobias finds the film visually accomplished but ultimately limited by its surface-level material. He praises Rooney Mara’s performance and the chemistry between her and Daniel Craig, while noting the film’s slow buildup and lengthy denouement.
Read the full review →The review finds the film stylish but let down by the source novel’s questionable substance. It praises Rooney Mara’s transformation while criticizing the character’s vulnerability and the story’s voyeuristic, misogynistic undertones.
Read the full review →Barrick finds that Fincher’s version feels fresh and surprising despite the familiar story. She particularly praises Rooney Mara’s portrayal of Lisbeth Salander.
Read the full review →The review finds Fincher’s remake a forceful improvement on the Swedish original and a finely honed thriller with political resonance. It praises the film’s kinetic style and Rooney Mara’s brittle, vulnerable Salander.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film beautifully executed and well acted, but ultimately emotionally disengaging and a lesser work in Fincher’s canon. He especially praises Rooney Mara’s controlled, compelling performance as Lisbeth Salander.
Read the full review →
ZodiacFincher’s other film about people reading old paper in bad light, and the better one.
Insomnia · not on Fi1m yetNorwegian original with Stellan Skarsgård as a detective coming apart under a sun that never sets.
Memories of MurderBong Joon-ho’s rain-soaked procedural about a case that will not close.
The Silence of the LambsThe template for the young woman investigator and the monster who talks to her.
The VanishingDutch thriller about a disappearance, told calmly, with the most horrible ending in the genre.
