Enter the ‘Dragon’

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“What is hidden in snow, comes forth in the thaw.”

This is an age-old Swedish proverb, and David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s mega-selling murder mystery novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a brutal, at times gruesome, and tension-loaded wait for the revealing thaw.

It’s a film that shocks, but not for shock’s sake. The gore and look-away graphic assaults depicted do serve character development, even if these are characters that make everyone around them uncomfortable.

Daniel Craig sheds his James Bond panache for a bookish everyman patina as Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist in Stockholm disgraced by an inaccurate story about a high-powered corporate magnate and the media frenzy libel lawsuit that ensued.

On the verge of abdicating his co-editor’s seat at a struggling magazine, Blomkvist is approached by a wealthy businessman, Henrick Vanger, with a unique proposal—to write the patriarch’s family biography and get to the heart of the decade’s old mystery behind the disappearance of his beloved teenage niece. Hooked by the intrigue, Blomkvist moves into a run-down cabin on the family’s vast island estate and begins his research into a shadowy family filled with Nazis, recluses and women who don’t speak to each other, much less outsiders.

When Blomkvist’s investigation hits a wall, he hires Lisbeth Salander—the jagged-edged computer hacker who completed Vanger’s background check on himself—to help him unravel the truth. Played by an unrecognizable Rooney Mara, Fincher’s version of Salander is emotionally stunted, almost alien in her interactions with others, and certainly the deeply wounded victim of serial abuse.

As one murder turns into several, Dragon Tattoo’s tension builds with fervor, though Fincher could have upped the pace by having the two leads join forces about 10 minutes sooner. As is, the film feels like two separate movies for too long. Salander’s assault and her revenge attack go miles toward explaining her exoskeleton nature, but it is not the graphic element of these scenes that makes them ill-fitted to Steven Zaillian’s script. It is that the time spent on them detracts us completely from the greater interest of this 40-year-old mystery and a bizarre family of wealthy cranks that has been dangled in front of us like a brand new Ikea living room set.

Fincher makes sure this nail-biting whodunnit keeps a thrill or spook a minute, but he does well to maintain Larsson’s expansive literary pace, leaving Mara, and in particular, Craig plenty of time to stretch and breathe under the icy veneers of these characters that audiences will watch evolve and unfold over the course of two more Larsson adaptations. Matching these stellar performances, and those of an eye-grabbing supporting cast led by Christopher Plummer and Stellan Skarsgard, Fincher and his long-time cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth have captured a Swedish landscape that perfectly fits Larsson’s dark tale. This world is chilling and beautiful, expansive and unforgiving, as if one of Dante’s levels of hell is boiling just beneath the sheen of fallen snow.