Enter the Dragon

Lisbeth,the goth-punk,sporting the tattoo, is not a girl to be messed with as potential rapists and her pervert of a parole officer find out. She is also aggressive in computer hacking. It is this peculiar skill which brings her into contact with Blumqvist, an investigative journalist whose career has been temporarily set back by a lost libel action. This chalk-and-cheese team eventually set out to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger twenty years previously:. Blumquvist having been commissioned by the rich and powerful head of the Vanger industrialist family to uncover the secret of her disappearance.

Having set up the basis of the plot,the film goes into disturbing depth as Blumquvist investigates the sometimes weird and awful members of the Vanger family with modern Nazis in its midst. The hard,shiny Vanger surface is probed fearlessly by the Blumquvist/Lisbeth duo which gets one or both of them in some sticky situations.

What is also interesting is that two narratives coalesce - the reason Blumquvist was set up to lose the libel action which involved a famous figure involved in gun-running is exposed by Lisbeth's hacking and the eventual discovery of the truth as to the disappearance of Vanger's niece. It is rare in films or novels to have such symmetry and it was most satisfying mainly because the two strands of the plot had to be resolved.

The washed-out colour look of the film suited the narrative and the whole thing was low key but nevertheless possessed a sinister and all-pervading noir-like atmosphere. This seems to be the Nordic trademark,noted also in the television series 'The Killing' and I shall be looking forward to seeing the other two films in the trilogy.