Scandinavian crime movies are generally steeped in an isolated, almost alien atmosphere that you don’t see in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

This taut thriller, which gives cinematic life to the first book in Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy, continues this tradition.

The traumatic tale focuses on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), an idealistic journalist who quits his job after losing a libel case. Out of the blue, a wealthy company president hires him to find out what happened to his niece, who mysteriously disappeared 40 years before, aged 16.

As his investigation gets underway, Mikael is cyber-stalked by an anarcho-goth hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) – the girl of the title – who eventually aids him in his quest. While this may sound like a straightforward story, it’s anything but. Once Lisbeth becomes involved, myriad skeletons are rattled from their cupboards, while elsewhere there’s a head-spinning array of twists and turns, and the plot descends into a darkness that threatens to consume the characters.

Director Niels Arden Oplev is open-hearted about revealing the clues to a crime that’s more appalling than initially imagined – involving Nazis, a human sacrifice cult and a super-sick serial killer. Yet at the same time, he’s not afraid of getting down and dirty with the heinous reality of the affair. Meanwhile, each location and character is laid bare in a warts-and-all fashion that sucks the viewer into the story.

The combination of these techniques makes for uneasy viewing, particularly during the violent episodes. For example, Lisbeth’s revenge scene, in which a bloated hulk of ageing male ego receives an anal raping and ends up with ‘I’m a sadist pig and a rapist’ tattooed on his belly. It’s the kind of cinematic moment that gets moralists frothing at the mouth because they deem it gratuitous, when in fact the reason it’s portrayed in such a fashion is to spell out the horror of the incident.

On the acting front, both Nyqvist and Rapace are convincing in their multifaceted odd-couple roles. It’s great news, then, that they return in the follow-up films – The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest – both released later this year.

Let’s just hope that the director of these flicks, Daniel Alfredson, delivers adaptations that do as much justice to Larsson’s books as Oplev’s rendering of The  Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – which is undoubtedly one of this year’s  most powerful and gripping movies.