A mystery thriller based on Stieg Larsson’s international best selling novel about a disgraced journalist and a troubled young female computer hacker who investigate the mysterious disappearance of an industrialist’s niece. - (Alert)
Forty years after a woman vanishes from a gathering of a powerful and secretive family, a journalist and a computer hacker are asked to solve the mystery of her disappearance. - (Baker & Taylor)
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found and her beloved uncle is convinced she was murdered and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed and troubled yet resourceful computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) to investigate. - (Music Box Films)
Video Librarian Reviews
It's rare for a film to completely capture the essence of an international bestseller—particularly a grim, suspenseful thriller—but this intense, indelibly gripping Swedish screen adaptation of the 2005 first novel in the late Stieg Larsson's acclaimed trilogy succeeds on all levels. As the story begins, veteran Stockholm financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is found guilty of criminal libel for his attacks on a corporate tycoon and ordered to serve a six-month jail sentence. But before he's sent to prison, Mikael is approached by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), the aristocratic patriarch of a prominent industrialist clan, to investigate what happened to his beloved teenage niece, who mysteriously disappeared back in 1966 during a family gathering on remote Hedeby Island in Sweden's frigid far north. And Vanger's wary lawyer has hired a pierced-and-tattooed 24-year-old hacker to spy on Mikael: the resourceful Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a sullen, bisexual, tomboyish truth-seeker who is determined to wreak revenge on predatory misogynists who abuse their power. Working together in an uneasy collaboration, kindred spirits Mikael and Lisbeth struggle to solve this 40-year-old ‘cold case.' Danish director Niels Arden Oplev distills the essence of Larsson's visually brutal, often disturbing, neo-Nazi whodunit concept, effectively discarding details that would clutter up the complex, twisting-and-turning narrative. One of Europe's top-grossing films of 2009 (tentatively slated for a Hollywood remake in 2012), this is highly recommended. (S. Granger) Copyright Video Librarian Reviews 2010.