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Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander. She’d done some work prior to this film, but this was a big breakout role for her that found her rolling into greater prominence in the international cinema - most recently picking up work in the latest Sherlock Holmes film. She’s got a kind of intensity onscreen that suits the character well. There’s a kind of silently observant precision about her performance that feels very true to the character, but much of the character's subtlety is robbed by a script that has been forced to truncate things. Thankfully, director Niels Arden Oplev allows enough silent moments onscreen for Rapace to work with in the process of moving from one scene to the next. Rapace may not come across quite as cold and meticulous as she does in the novel. Actually, she looks a bit more like a model trying to look punk than a legitimate punk, but her performance carries enough of what it needs to make for a remarkably compelling performance.

There’s a lack of physical grittiness to the film that tarnishes the whole thing a bit. It all feels a little sterile where it shouldn’t and the film feels remarkably clean, even in its darker moments. That lack of physical, textural complexity feeds into the films treatment of the novel, which is a similarly pristine affair with few details that carry the kind of lush ambiguity that is so abundant in Larsson’s original novel. As a result, the mystery elements of the suspense are conspicuously absent. Not that they aren’t present at all, (this is a mystery at its heart) but without a deep presentation of all the tiny details, the film can only focus on some of the drama behind the mystery.

Following as it does a book with some pretty tight pacing, the film feels a lot more Hollywood than many European films. Things move along pretty quickly, but so much of the story plays out in relatively simple exposition that is, in all fairness, delivered with a really solid sense of dramatic reality. The problem is that fairly good acting performances end up existing in kind of a strange vacuum. Though there is no mistaking the authenticity of the film’s setting, there simply isn’t enough atmosphere around the basic elements of the central mystery to feel at all substantial.

The film ends up feeling like a strange museum diorama. All of the elements feel a authentic and they’re all in the right order (more or less), but they lack enough atmosphere to feel completely authentic beyond those few pieces that are in the center of the frame at any one moment. And what’s there is beautiful and horrifying at times. In addition to being able to pull some pretty solid performances out of the cast, Oplev sculpts some pretty beautiful shots in here in some pretty interesting moments. True, much of it looks made for TV, but every now and then there’s a moment that really pops and it ends up being some really beautiful filmmaking.

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