The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo –  review

Over the last fifteen years or so, we've come to expect David Fincher to deliver the best thrillers in town; even the films considered his relative failures (such as Zodiac) have been bracing, compelling affairs thanks to the director's effortless balance between aggressive darkness and storytelling verve.

No surprises then, that his remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is in many ways a superior re-imagining. It's true that, although hardly Americanised, this new version tones down the original's cultural European subtleties - and indeed subtitles - but it also amps up the fear, the violence and the sense that we're on a smooth, powerful ride.

Daniel Craig is both likably bumbling and believably tough as the journo hired to decide which member of an aristocratic family is responsible for a string of foul woman killings, while Rooney Mara lends an intense single-mindedness to his unlikely ally: the hyper-intelligent, viciously defensive techno-goth Lisbeth.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo doesn't exactly invite its audience to understand the piecing together of its puzzle, preferring Macbook babblings and fast editing to get its mystery-explaining done. However, it's pretty ice-cool otherwise: Trent Reznor's soundtrack serves as an undercurrent of the demented madness that finally manifests as the film's villain, while Fincher uses sweeping camerawork and a Hitchcockian sense of dramatic countdown to deliver the goods yet again.

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