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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a terrifically thrilling and agonizingly taut mystery epic; it creates an arcane hedge maze of corrupt industrial legacies and dark family secrets and populates that maze with a pair of most extraordinary protagonists. It’s quite possibly the best pulp thriller in several years. David Fincher has reportedly been eyeing it up for remake, but I honestly don’t know what else he could bring to the table.

Based off the novel by Swedish author Steig Larsson, Girl is also that rare cinematic adaptation that honors and enriches the source material. Whether you have encountered Lisbeth Salander first in the printed word, or in the confines of this movie, where she is energetically portrayed by Noomi Rapace, you will walk away with the impression of having met a living, breathing person.

Salander, the titular gal with the tattoo, is Larsson’s most beguiling and compelling creation; a 20-something, socially stunted hacker who’s convinced the world at large she’s mentally handicapped when in fact, she’s quite the opposite. Also a child of extreme abuse and neglect, Salander doesn’t really enter the focus of Tattoo’s primary story until an hour in, but when she does she steals the show. And what a show it is to steal.

There’s no possible way to do justice to all of the tangled and complex elements of Girl’s plot in writing, so I’ll skip lengthy analysis to discuss, instead, the way the film version brings that plot to life and makes it light up the screen.

First, there’s the casting of the two leads. I’ve briefly mentioned Lisbeth Salander, but Larsson’s other protagonist, the one we get to know first, is Mikael Blomkvist, a well known and gifted journalist who’s currently facing charges of libel. Blomkvist’s legal troubles open the door for his involvement in a decades old cold case that puts him in the orbit of the Vangers, an expansive and wealthy industrialist family. It is this mystery that becomes the catalyst for his partnership with Salander and it’s also the backbone of the story.

Michael Nyqvist slips into the role with a kind of rumpled pluckiness and understated confidence. His character has undergone public failure, but it doesn’t affect his tenacity or roving eye for details. He provides a performance that cuts to the very center of the novel’s Blomkvist and defines him as a man of thought and reason, who can truly appreciate the aptitude and skill of Rapace’s Salander. He’s not your average hardened noir hero, but a 3-dimensional portrait of the intrepid and dogged reporter. He propels the plot forward and tackles the treacherous caverns of Larsson’s potboiler so efficiently that he frees up Rapace so that she can focus her energy on building and nurturing the camaraderie of this crime-fighting duo.

Rapace, for her part, has the graceful skill of stepping into Salander’s shoes so completely that the performance feels more like being than acting. Larsson’s novel is only a few years old in publication terms (Dragon and its sequels were published posthumously beginning in 2005) but Salander has a very specific and concrete presence in the minds of fans. Rapace covers the visual portrayal of Salander perfectly, nailing all the goth decoration and surly intelligence that magnified the character on the printed page.

She gives us something that matches with our own mental images of the woman and then methodically unpacks the psychological richness that Larsson wrote into her. Mystery stories are often only as good as their plots, but this is one of the rare instances where the dazzle and complexity exist first and foremost in the characters.

Outside of Rapace and Nyqvist, director Niels Arden Oplev adorns Girl with a fantastic and antique visual verve that really fits the Danish setting and the thematic darkness of the story. There are some intensely violent and uncomfortable scenes in the film, especially when it comes to the life of Salander, but Oplev walks the line of depicting events matter-of-factly and simply suggesting the depth of the abyss without aiming his camera directly into it.

There’s not half as much onscreen abuse as one might suspect, and that is certainly a good thing. While the film itself is not misogynistic, it does deal heavily and thoughtfully with abuse towards women; stacking its deck with grittiness isn’t simply a shock-based decision. Interweaving grainy film footage, slick fx, and a very stately, haunting cinematography, Tattoo embraces us completely in its style and atmosphere and then lets the tale itself do its work.

Sharing some very basic similarities with a few other international pictures—the Red Riding trilogy and The Chaser come to mind—Girl trumps the lot of them by sending us on its quest with some excellent, multi-layered travelling companions. Even when the road gets rocky and the path obscured by night, Salander and Blomkvist grab us by the hand and lead us out of the woods. On the page, they return for two more novels. As filmgoers, we can only be so lucky as to see Rapace and Nyqvist reprise their roles.

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