#Both Versions Of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Will Ink Your Brain

Niels Arden Oplev helmed the first adaptation of the first novel in Stiegg Larson’s “Millennium” trilogy. The Swedish iteration of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is more matter-of-fact in its mise-en-scene, with its lighting and staging and overall production value reflecting a $13 million budget. Like a fly on the wall it simply observes, delivering a flat representation of what is going on in the room, even when that’s something horrible.

Michael Nyqvist, known to American audiences for playing the villain in “John Wick” and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” doesn’t have the same superstar quality as Craig. This iteration gives Mikael more of a personal connection to Harriet Vanger, the girl whose decades-old disappearance he is investigating. 

The main selling point here is Rapace, who went all-in on the role of Lisbeth and holds a magnetism that would soon see her crossing over into Hollywood blockbusters like “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” and “Prometheus.” Piercings, black lipstick, and a spiky collar form a goth impression when we first meet her resourceful hacker, Lisbeth. With her hair plastered to one side, she sits and absorbs data, applying her photographic memory to quotes from the Book of Leviticus.

Rapace’s Lisbeth has more muscle on her frame and projects an inner strength to go along with it. Rapace trained for months in advance, taking up Thai boxing and kickboxing and getting her motorcycle license. The movie shows men hitting her, yet she gives as good as she gets — taking on five guys in train station, waving a broken bottle at them, and putting up more of a fight when her new legal guardian suddenly handcuffs her to a bed. The veins on her neck bulge as she uses his own sex toy against him and tattoos, “I’m a sadist pig and a rapist,” on his chest in Swedish. 

It’s not for the faint of heart. When he was 15, Larsson witnessed an appalling crime against a woman, and his own failure to act left him haunted, grappling with the scourge of misogyny in his books, which were published posthumously and only became bestsellers after-the-fact.