Mara and Craig.

In the blood-soaked hands of the hair-raising, always surprising director David Fincher, the creepy remake of Sweden’s grisly thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is dreary and confusing but technically superb—a darkly photographed and superbly acted film. It is not my cup of bitter tea laced with arsenic, but I admire its tenacity in keeping the viewer dazzled, while the toxic effect of its violence, sometimes unwatchable, left me charged. I hated the 2009 Swedish film version, my dashed attempt to read the book (the first volume in the crime trilogy by the late, overrated Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson) put me to sleep faster than a double-dose of Dalmane, and I still don’t understand why it has been recycled in an estimated $100 million remake as unnecessary as it is unoriginal. It is also impossibly long-winded. When it ended, after just under a whopping three hours, I ended up impressed, in spite of my reservations. If I had found it even half as incomprehensible as it is, I might have liked it twice as much.

Oh, my god, that plot. After being investigated for making licentious mistakes in fact-checking a magazine profile that causes a scandal, the controversial, complicated and egotistical journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) loses his job, apartment, moral compass and most of his sanity. Then he spends the rest of this interminable, head-scratching thriller trying not to lose his life and everything below his gym-ready waistline and above his walnut-cracking thighs in one scene of nasty brutality after another. He’s crafty, but he’s also a two-fisted fool for getting recruited by Swedish industrial tycoon Henrik Vanger (a wasted Christopher Plummer) to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago from a family reunion on a sinister island with an unpronounceable name off the coast of Sweden. The case was never solved, but Vanger believes she was murdered by a member of his own dysfunctional family. Here the brain-twisting plot begins to get delusional. As the reporter begins to unravel multiplying clues, he tracks down and hires Lisbeth Salander (newcomer Rooney Mara), a chain-smoking, motorcycle-riding Goth lesbian computer hacker shrouded in black leather whose invasion of his hard drive reveals the errors that have tanked his career. This zombie is a real creep workout, replete with body piercings, a dragon tattoo that encircles her body and more rings around her eyes than a rabid raccoon.

Sharing a deserted cottage by the sea in a gray, frozen Swedish winter, the reporter and his freaked-out researcher, equipped with his-and-her laptops, dig up newspaper reports from the year Harriet disappeared, connecting an entire series of homicides, and before you can yell “Holy Whitechapel Ripper!” the Vanders turn out to be a whole family of serial killers! There’s Henrik’s brother, a Nazi who died in 1940, and the brother’s son, Gottfried, and grandson, Martin (Stellan Skarsgård), the latter two of whom continually raped and sodomized Harriet, Martin’s sister, who moved to Australia and is living under the assumed name of her cousin Anita. It takes an hour and a half before the two stars of this bizarre puzzle meet and he hires her to look up all the other women who have been murdered under similar circumstances, all raped and killed, all with names from the Bible and linked by verses from Leviticus. Then, under pressure, they end up in bed in a savage sexual fury—an unconvincing twist, since Lisbeth has endured a lifetime of rape and sexual torture herself, and despises men. (We’ve just seen her sewing up an eye with dental floss, tying up a victim and tattooing “I AM A RAPIST PIG” on his chest with a carving knife.) Reckless, hostile and pretty close to being a serial killer herself, she’s seriously damaged, exacting gruesome revenge on anyone who crosses her, but when it comes to her boss, she melts, saving a naked Mr. Craig from an unbearably convincing basement torture chamber that leaves nothing to the imagination.

I’m a big fan of the kind of sleaze and terror David Fincher is famous for (think Se7en and Fight Club) and this is no exception. The great screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s elaborate, convoluted script, so muddled that even after it’s over you still don’t know what it’s all about, is a drawback—but the movie is a master class in sinister style, tense and deeply uncomfortable. The cold Swedish dreamscape of blackness is so effective that sometimes you feel like you need a flashlight. Mr. Fincher also knows how to bring out the fearlessness in actors. As James Bond, Mr. Craig is a terrific mixture of sarcastic charm and sartorial splendor, in or out of the sack, but when the role calls for something darker, he’s equally well equipped. Mr. Skarsgård is especially scary because of the sheer exploitation of power with which he manipulates people under the guise of polite, amiable calm—making his later scenes from friendly to ferocious doubly shocking. Ms. Mara is a damaged ferret, her eyes darting, her tongue rubbing her stapled lips as she helps the mentally distraught reporter try to make sense of a deepening mystery. It all adds up to a noxious brew of teeth-grinding, knuckle-whitening brutality. Merry Christmas to you, too.

rreed@observer.com

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Running time 158 minutes

Written by Steven Zaillian and Stieg Larsson

Directed by David Fincher

Starring Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara and Stellan Skarsgård

2.5/4

NPR speaks with Ann Holt, a former justice minister in Norway who is now a bestselling author of detective fiction.

At The New Yorker Book Bench, Joan Acocella reflects on instances of Scandinavian extremism contemplated by the Swedish mystery writer Stieg Larsson.

Jo Nesbo, author of the detective novel The Snowman, writes about the attacks for The New York Times.

And n+1 has two essays: one by the Norwegian-American writer Julia Grønnevet, who was in Norway at the time of the attacks, and one by the German writer Yascha Mounk about a turn against pluralism in Europe.

Comparisons end there, however. The scene that would-be Lisbeths had to read departs a bit from family friendly wizarding fare.

"We had five or six girls audition with the rape scene," Fincher told W. "The girls had to kick a dildo up his ass. That’s Salander’s big scene, and we had to see if they could do it."

And in the end, the actress who most convincingly kicked a dildo up the guy's ass was Rooney Mara.

The cover story, entitled "David Fincher Gets The Girl," reveals the details that fans of the global sensation that is Steig Larsson's Millenium Trilogy have been dying to hear for months. And, perhaps more importantly, the issue comes with big glossy pictures of Mara as Salander: Rooney with her jet-black hair weed-whacked off and spiked into an unruly mohawk; Rooney with a cigarette dangling from piercing-clad lips, bottomless and sprawled chest-down in a tattoo parlor, getting ink done; Rooney with her legs in tattered leggings akimbo across a motorcycle, eyes smeared with oil-hued eyeliner. One could say that Fincher made the right choice.

But while the film's aesthetic pleasures may be confirmed, it remains to be seen whether it can deliver the dynamo entertainment the books apparently offers in spades. Even if things do look good on paper, Fincher and screenwriter Steve Zallian plan on diverging from the books and Swedish movies drastically.

[The script] departs rather dramatically from the book. Blomkvist is less promiscuous, Salander is more aggressive, and, most notably, the ending—the resolution of the drama—has been completely changed. This may be sacrilege to some, but Zaillian has improved on Larsson—the script’s ending is more interesting.

Get ready for the intense fanbase backlash!

And naturally, Hirschberg gets in a few of her signature cutting jabs, those barbs that made her profile of M.I.A. so scathing. She quotes mega-producer Scott Rudin -- Dragon Tattoo's producer, in fact -- as saying Fincher has the same "fuck-off arrogance" as the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network. And she paints the auteur accordingly: one anecdote has Fincher explaining that he divides into the categories of true "films" or simply little "movies."

And what of The Social Network, Fincher's best chance at a best director Oscar? "It's a little glib to be a film," he says. Let's hope the Academy doesn't read W!

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Piers Morgan Defends A Cell-Abusing Arianna

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

Random House has doubled its profits and increased worldwide sales 8 percent in the first half of 2010 — with no small thanks to the enormous sales of Larsson's three Millennium Trilogy crime novels. Dohle doesn't hide his glee at how readers have embraced Larsson's books, which are published by Random House in Germany and the United States. In those countries alone, the company has shilled a cumulative 6.5 million physical, electronic and audio copies, a figure Dohle says had a "substantial" impact on the entire company's first-half numbers.

He doesn't forget to mention that Larsson is the first author to sell a million e-books for the Kindle. As a result, Random House is "so excited" about its "robust digital-publishing momentum." 

The memo also lists the upcoming releases that could maintain the publishing house's winning streak, including George W. Bush's memoir Decision Points, out Nov. 8. We'll have to wait and see if Bush's portrayal of himself can prove as popular as Larsson's Lisbeth Salander.

Or seek out a more creative destination. Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards, who had a pretty good week with the new Stieg Larsson, said that he wasn't much of a Hamptons-goer.

"I have a preference for more remote locales, and am in fact en route to a golf tournament where I am going to take a page out of salander's playbook and beat my opponent into the ground," he wrote, in a message sent from his iPhone.

Bon voyage!