David Fincher’s (Zodiac, Fight Club) take on the first of Stieg Larson’s Lisbeth Salander novels fascinates most for its utter lack of extraneous content. No moment is wasted, no detail immaterial. As such, its 158 minutes zip by.

Suppressing his impulse for technological innovation (it’s easy to forget he had one actor play both twins in The Social Network), Fincher delivers an aptly glacial and calmly hurtling adaptation of Larson’s chart-topping story—which, for the uninitiated, has a disgraced journalist (Daniel Craig) team with a guileless young genius hacker (Rooney Mara) to tackle a decades-old murder case on a private island in hibernal Sweden.

Slick, classy and veined by a wicked sense of humour (we might never see a superior use of Enya), this is narrative cinema vacuum packed.

[[gerard]] Gerard Elson works at Readings St Kilda.