The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009)

The Swedish title of this film translates to Men Who Hate Women, which is the sort of thing that would serve as a thesis statement if the film had not already decided to be a thriller instead. Niels Arden Oplev directs with a flat, efficient grimness, and Noomi Rapace supplies the film's only real pulse as Lisbeth Salander. The picture is competent, chilly, and about ninety minutes of cold-case procedure wrapped around a grimmer ninety minutes of abuse and retribution.

Salander is the engine of whatever social consciousness the film possesses. She is a hacker of genius, a ward of a sadistic state-appointed guardian, and a woman who answers violation with a Taser and a tattoo needle. The rape-revenge arc is unambiguous, and the film treats male violence against women as a structural fact of the Vanger family rather than the work of a single bad actor. The cold case itself turns on a Nazi past and a string of antisemitic murders, though these register as historical crimes to be solved, not as a living indictment. A corrupt industrialist gets his comeuppance in the final reel, and the film seems pleased with this without ever asking why men like him exist.

Salander is coded as socially atypical, perhaps diagnosable, and the film is content to let her strangeness sit unexplained. The moral arrives through plot, not sermon. Nobody stands up to deliver a speech about the patriarchy. The film simply shows us a woman surviving men, and trusts us to draw the conclusion. It is a serious piece of work about serious things. Whether that constitutes a program is another question, and the film, to its credit, declines to answer it. It remains a cold, well-made mystery with a bruised center, and it knows exactly how much it wants to say out loud.

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