Watching this exquisite crime movie, I wondered:  Who wrote the story for the script. So I did some research and discovered that it was indeed a Swede to wrote the story. Frequently, writers live rather boring lives. Not so in the case of   Stieg Larsson.  According to his partner of 20 years, Larsson’s witnessed a rape when he was young and never forgave himself for not trying to stop it. In real life he tried to be a journalists but apparently did not have the social skills and personality to fit into a news organization. Larsson worked tirelessly to counter radical right wing activists in Sweden. This endangered his life. Larsson and his partner never married because the address of a newly married coupled is published in Sweden and Larsson’s would have been more easily targeted.  The hero, Mikael Blomkvist (Craig Daniel), and the heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), seem to be an amplified version of Larsson, but not in a way that this would became in any way tedious.

As we witnessed last year when a lunatic right-wing lunatic shot 70plus people, there is an undercurrent of violence in the otherwise congenial countries. This violent undercurrent is captured in the first film of the Millennium trilogy. The film captures the landscape and mood of Sweden during wintertime very well. I will certainly see the next two films when they come out to see what happens this very creative Swedish reworking of the crime novel genre.