(2009; Män som hatar kvinnor, Swedish) In Stockholm just before Christmas, after being found guilty of libel against financial tycoon Hans-Erik Wennerström, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), an investigative journalist for Millennium magazine, takes a call from his publisher Dirch Frode (Ingvar Hirdwall), offering him a job from Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), the CEO emeritus of the wealthy, family-owned Vanger Group, to search for clues to the 40-year-old mysterious disappearance of a favorite niece, Harriet Vanger, daughter of Gottfried and Isabella and sister to Martin (Peter Haber), suspected of having been murdered when she was sixteen in September 1966.

Henrik shows Blomkvist his collection of framed flowers sent to him anonymously from different parts of the world on each of his birthdays, cruelly continuing a tradition Harriet had begun as a girl. Mistrustful of his relations (some of whom had Nazi connections back in the '30s) - suspecting "nobody, everybody" of foul play - Henrik, who's 82 and lives on the secluded island of Hedestaad with other members of the clan, tells Blomkvist: "They wanted to crush me."

Back in the '60s as a child Mikael, while living on the island with his mother, had been under the care of Harriet and her cousin Anita (who has since died of cancer). Unexpectedly Anita's sister Cecilia (Marika Lagercrantz) returns to Hedestaad from Scotland, taking an interest in his exploration of the photographs and diary for evidence. Blomkvist also enlists the assistance of detective inspector Gustav Morell (Björn Granath), who first investigated the case.

In hopes of proving that his reporter was framed, Frode also hired a professional hacker with the Milton Security firm, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a 24-year-old mathematics adept with a photographic memory and Asperger syndrome, who wears goth attire and makeup with metal piercings and a spiked necklace; she has a new legal guardian assigned to her, Nils Bjurman, a lawyer, who controls her assets, demanding sexual favors for access to her funds. As a child Lisbeth had intentionally incinerated a man, resulting in her being sent to a children's psychiatric ward; she gets revenge from Bjurman (including tattooing him) for his abuse of her.

In this fascinating first adaptation of the Millennium trilogy of the late writer Stieg Larssen, director Niels Arden Oplev, with the help of screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, scatters throughout the seductive thriller tantalizing hints of what's yet to come in future episodes in the same way the plot gradually gets peeled away, revealing layer beneath layer of the hideous events.

Having hacked Blomkvist's computer and assured of his innocence, Lisbeth as Wasp sends him a helpful message to decode and untangle a list of names and numbers he's found in Harriet's diary, leading to their becoming partners in the quest to discover Harriet's assailant. As they work closely together, learning of a series of unsolved murders of women, involving pseudo-religious ritualized slayings, and realize someone is attempting to prevent their finding out anything further, they form an uncertain attachment, in which Lisbeth, who has a dragon tattooed on her back, knows a great deal about the divorced man's history but keeps her own violent past and present a secret.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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