The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (4 Stars)

Have you ever suffered from a severe case of writer's block? That's me with this film. I've been staring at this blank page for over an hour. Let me just make a few comments, and maybe I'll build up momentum as I go along.

This is the first film in the Millennium Trilogy, three books written by Swedish author Stieg Larsson but not published till after his death. The three films were released in Sweden in quick succession, between March and November 2009.

The films have long fascinated me, so when I saw they were on sale cheap on Blu-ray I grabbed them. After watching the first film I'm not disappointed, I liked it a lot, but it's not what I expected. I thought it would be an action film. Not at all. It's a criminal investigation, like a police detective story, except the person investigating is a reporter, not a policeman.

The story: Mikael Blomkvist is a reporter for a magazine called Millennium. He has investigated a billionaire, but he was set up. False information was deliberately fed to him, and now he has been sued for libel and is sentenced to three months in prison. But the sentence will not begin until six months later. Is that usual in Sweden? I couldn't imagine a prison sentence in England being deferred by more than a few days. Usually it begins immediately after conviction.

During these six months he is hired by another industrialist, Henrik Vanger. Forty years ago, in 1966, his 16-year-old niece Harriet had disappeared during a family meeting, and he assumes that one of his family members has killed her. The police has long given up on the case, but Vanger thought Blomkvist might be able to unearth something. And he does. He finds notes in Harriet's diary that point to religiously motivated murders that had been committed between 1949 and 1965.

So where does the girl with the tattoo fit in? Vanger had previously hired a company to check up on Blomkvist, to decide if he was suitable for the job. The company used a computer hacker called Lisbeth Salander to spy on him. After discovering he was being watched Blomkvist asked Salander to help him with the case. She's the one with the tattoo.

A very good film. I wonder if the recent Hollywood remake with Daniel Craig even comes close? Somehow I'm scared to find out.

Click here to view the trailer. If "Van Helsing" has a good trailer, this is a bad trailer. It wrongly gives the impression that this is an action film by just picking out the very few exciting moments.