Under gory details, 'Dragon Tattoo' shines

After watching “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev’s grisly detective story based on a series of popular novels, I found myself thinking of another recent whodunit.

Director David Fincher’s “Zodiac” was released a few years ago, and concerned the namesake killer who stalked the Bay Area in the late 1960s.

“Zodiac” gets down into details of its murders, and as it is true to history, never catches up with its antagonist. But it still made for a good movie because it overcame that missing satisfaction of closure by riding the strong performances of its actors. And further, it wisely reveled in the story’s telling.

A detective story can run the risk of becoming overly procedural, becoming bogged down in details, until it’s a list of facts and clues.

If you present the audience with such a list, you had better make the details scandalous enough for the audience to keep giving a damn. I find people start to get antsy after two hours in a movie theater.

“Zodiac” purposefully lingers in the details to let its unsolved mystery consume its characters. “Dragon Tattoo” doesn’t do exactly that, but it shares some similarities.

The film — opening today at Vinegar Hill Theatre — has a villain who is far from its most memorable character. Its crimes are grisly and graphic. And its leading actors are alone worth the price of admission. But unlike “Zodiac,” it has a conclusion.

It has finality enough that you could put a bow on top of it, and it has sequels that already have been made and released in Europe.

The film opens on investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), recently found guilty of libel and facing a prison sentence. I was unaware that defamation is a jailable offense in Scandinavia, which shows what you can learn by going to the movies.

But, anyway, during his brief window of freedom, Blomkvist is hired by an elderly member of a wealthy industrial family (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate the decades-old disappearance of his favorite niece.

He believes a relative murdered her, and the facts of her vanishing seem to support that.

With this premise, the methodical Blomkvist moves onto the rural and remote family compound, and the plot expands into every little corner of the case of the missing blond teenager. But not without simultaneously introducing us to Noomi Rapace, who turns in a great performance as leather-bound computer hacker Lisbeth. Abused by authority figures — and the film takes the time to depict that abuse in scenes that will make you flinch — she is skittish and standoffish, a feminist working-class hero hired to perform due diligence on Blomkvist by his new employer.

When the plot pairs these two as a super Scandinavian detective duo and sets them digging through the sex- and violence-fueled history of a clan of Swedish aristocrats, it feels like the rest of the movie was superfluous setup. I get the feeling that it was.

The pair generates a real sense of tension between them and propels the story through its surroundings — enough that I was more interested in their interaction than in who had actually done the dirty deed to that missing blond niece.

And that’s OK. A good detective tale needs engaging detectives, after all. But with such strong performances by Nyqvist and Rapace, the brutality of the movie’s source material seems overdone.

The details of this detective story are salacious, yes. But necessarily so graphic? Oplev unfortunately lingers a little too long in the morbid gristle, but it isn’t enough to detract from the movie’s pluses.

This is Swedish cinema worth checking out. And if you like this one enough, just wait until the powers that be release its two sequels stateside.