The Swedish crime novel, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” has become quite a sensation. That fact alone could doom any film adaptation—the comparison to the original being too big a hurdle to overcome—but, director Niels Oplev and his writers have stripped the book down to an exceptionally compelling tale.

Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a journalist who gets hired for an unusual assignment. A wealthy industrialist, Martin Vanger (Peter Haber), wants him to solve the mystery of his niece’s disappearance forty years ago. As he settles into the island compound of the industrialist and his clan, Blomkvist makes a series of unsettling discoveries, not the least of which is that he is being cyber-stalked. Someone has hacked into his computer and is feeding him clues in his investigation.

The hacker is the girl in the title of the film, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a researcher for a private security firm that did the background check on Blomqvist. Blomqvist brings Lisbeth on as his assistant and the two begin to unearth a series of brutal murders of young women all of which seem to tie back to the unpleasant crew Vanger regretfully calls family.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a distant cinematic cousin to “The Silence of the Lambs.” Both are excellent crime thrillers that made a leap into brilliance on the back of a very talented actress and the singular quality she brought to her character. Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling possessed a vulnerable honesty that cut like a knife through the evil that swirled around her.

Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is the opposite: utterly guarded and self contained. She has a hard, punk-rock exterior that she is loathe to let anyone penetrate. Rapace finds the fault line between that tough exterior and the aching wounds that lie just beneath it. She holds on our attention on that uneasy chemistry of determination and vulnerability until it flavors the film’s entire narrative. Like Clarice, her integrity is a force that can’t easily be stopped. For all the excellent acting in this film, it is Lisbeth who propels the film forward.

Michael Nyqvist, who is the ostensible hero of the film, has to play in Rapace’s shadow, but he does good work with it. He functions as a stand-in for the rest of us in relation to Rapace’s almost mythic heroine.

The film is long and tangled but somehow keeps a crisp feel to its narrative. As Mikael and Lisbeth get closer to the truth their world becomes more dangerous and Martin Vanger’s family gets seedier. It’s all dark and breathless fun.

While the film’s ending bogs down a bit trying to tie up the loose ends of Mikael’s and Lisbeth’s lives, it does provide a nifty introduction to the sequel.

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev
Rated R
*** (Three and one half stars)