The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Niels Arden Oplev directed the first film of the trilogy; Daniel Alfredson took over for the second and the third, and Ulf Rydberg wrote this one. The casting keeps it in the family. Evert Gullberg, the former head of the secret unit inside the security service, who silences Zalachenko in hospital, is played by Hans Alfredson, the director’s father and one of Sweden’s best known comic performers; it was his last cinema work. The courtroom runs the same way: Annika Giannini, the lawyer defending Salander, is the sister of the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, so the magazine strand and the trial strand pass through one family. What played in cinemas is effectively the short version. The same material was recut as a six part television series shown on SVT1 in spring 2010, each episode running about 90 minutes, the whole set roughly 110 minutes longer than the three features. That version won the International Emmy for best television movie or miniseries in 2011. A good fit if you would rather have files, testimony and an expert witness taken apart than a chase, and want the ending in a courtroom. Not for anyone coming to watch Salander herself. Reviewing it for Dagens Nyheter, Maaret Koskinen made that complaint too, writing that one sees Noomi Rapace far too little.