The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Fincher opens on two minutes twenty five seconds of all-digital titles: faces, cables and tattoos dissolving in black fluid. He called it what rages through Lisbeth’s mind while she sleeps: nothing in it is plot, and a viewer reading it for setup gets nothing. The mismatched accents are also deliberate. Rooney Mara plays a Swedish lilt while Daniel Craig attempts none; Craig defended it: plenty of Scandinavians speak English perfectly, he is one of them, and an accent would get in the way. Mara was pierced for real, eyebrows shaved off, hair cropped, rings through nose, brow and nipple. The shoot ran 160 days on RED cameras, many of the Swedish days below freezing. The solution breaks with the book: the novel and the 2009 Swedish version leave Harriet alive in Australia, while here the Anita found in London turns out to be Harriet. Martin’s death shifts too: a deliberate act in the book, a rescue Lisbeth declines in the Swedish film, an explosion here that takes the choice from her. A good fit if you accept that the murder file closes before the film does and the last stretch goes to the fraud case set up in the opening scene. Not a fit if the rape and revenge scenes, held long rather than cut around, are too much.