Noomi Rapace

Watch Noomi Rapace want something. In Prometheus (2012) her Elizabeth Shaw wears a cross and wants to meet the beings who made her, and Rapace plays it not as faith or as curiosity but as appetite, held in the jaw and the shoulders. Few actors can make a longing look like a physical strain. The script gives her a dead father in a dream and calls that a character; she makes something of it anyway, and it is her doing, not the writers'.

That physical commitment is how she got here. The career began small, with a non-speaking part aged seven in the Icelandic film In the Shadow of the Raven (1988), then a move away from home at 15 to study acting in Stockholm, stage work, Swedish television and independent films such as Daisy Diamond (2007). In 2009 came Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the rest of the Millennium trilogy, for which she trained in martial arts, had herself pierced and changed her hair, and became known abroad almost overnight. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Prometheus followed as the English-language phase, and the later work moves between the arthouse and television: What Happened to Monday (2017), in which she plays all the Settman siblings, Lamb (2021), an Icelandic folk horror she also executive-produced, and the series Constellation.

The trouble with a breakthrough like Salander is that it fixes you. For years the international press took the character for the woman, an angry and aggressive presence, a reading Rapace has said does not match her, and a good deal of what she has done since looks like an attempt to get out from under it. She has put it this way: "I’ve always seen myself as a human rather than a woman." That is as good an account of her acting as anyone has offered. She plays a person under pressure first and lets everything else arrive afterwards. We will admit that in Prometheus we believed in Shaw's hunger to meet her makers more than the film deserved, and that was Rapace: the script cannot say why Shaw wants it, but she can show that she does, and for a few minutes at a time the film's large questions felt like one woman's rather than a studio's.

What she has not had, on the evidence of what we have reviewed, is a part that matches the force with a fully written person. Ridley Scott, who has worked with her twice, gave her Shaw and then gave Shaw a cross and a dream and left the rest to her. The body is always ready; the pages are not always there. We would like to see a film patient enough to let her sit still and find out what happens. Until then, see her in Prometheus for the hour the pictures are good, and watch the woman who keeps wanting after the script has stopped explaining why.