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BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

It's not easy to make research seem exciting, but director Niels Arden Oplev has done it in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," his compelling film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stieg Larsson. Larsson's book sold more than eight million copies worldwide, and this film adaptation was last year's highest grossing film in Europe. That's pretty astonishing, considering that the two protagonists spend most of their time sitting in front of computer screens or visiting libraries. Unlike American movie detectives, professional or amateur, they don't get their information by beating people bloody or threatening snitches to tell or else. They do it the new-fashioned way — they look it up on the Internet.

That's not to say that the film avoids violence. It doesn't. There is plenty of brutality, and it's not romanticized. Oplev has chosen to strip sexual violence of the glamour that it's often accorded in the movies, and present it with lacerating realism. That violence stalks Lisbeth Salander, a troubled but gifted computer hacker who works as a snooper for a Swedish security company. Thin and high-strung, Lisbeth burrows into the background of Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who has just lost a libel case brought against him and his magazine by a powerful industrialist. Lisbeth is working on behalf of another extraordinarily wealthy man, Henrik Vanger, who wants to hire Mikael to look into the disappearance of his beloved niece Harriet. The girl vanished 40 years earlier, and though her body was never found, Vanger is convinced that she was murdered, and suspects that a member of his extended family is responsible. He has his reasons; the family is a deeply distasteful bunch that includes Nazis, alcoholics, and general creeps.

Sweden is such an enlightened society that Mikael has six months free before he has to serve his prison term, so he takes the gig and moves out to the isolated island where the Vanger manse is located. The cinematographer Eric Kress uses a palette of gray and blue and white to emphasize the frigid loneliness of the Swedish countryside. It's not only cold, but menacing. The unheated house where Mikael is staying perches at the edge of the sea, and the pathways and barren trees seen on his jogs through the woods feel frightening and gloomy. But Mikael fills the woodstove, sets up his laptops and printer, and gets to work researching the family.

At the same time, Lisbet has a terrifying encounter with Sweden's probation system. She meets her new guardian, a middle-aged man with obvious control issues. This relationship does not develop well, to say the least, and the predictable assault is still shocking when it occurs. Opley doesn't flinch from the ugly details, but he doesn't use his camera to titillate either. This rape is about the violence, not the sex.

It's when Mikael and Lisbeth begin to work together on the case of Harriet's disappearance that this procedural begins its research in earnest. Sweden must have great bandwidth, because their computers deliver huge amounts of information lightning fast. They drive to follow up leads, which gets them out of the house, but sometimes they go to records halls and other depositories of documents to look more stuff up. Still, the film manages to ratchet the tension tighter and tighter, and although long (over two hours) it is never dull. A generous proportion of sex scenes makes the time go by.

Good performances from the Swedish/Danish cast and skillful editing combine to deliver an absorbing mystery with an unusually detailed plot. Those Europeans are onto something.

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