With The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher gets back to the basics of his career – a quintessential thriller set in a world of dark and hidden terrors, riddled with violence so deeply seeded that it cuts to the core. And that’s where our heroine works. She is a hacker – a Goth girl with piercings – who looks as dark as this world.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original Swedish title: Men Who Hate Women) is adapted the first book of Stieg Larsson’s hit series, The Millennium Trilogy. All of the three books in the trilogy have been made into Swedish films.

The plot opens with Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) and Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) both starting out separately, facing their individual struggles. Mikael, a reporter at a magazine named Millennium, has lost a libel suit for false reporting against a big financial mogul Wennerström (Ulf Friberg). Tainted professionally and financially, he accepts the job of writing memoires of Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), the retired head of Vanger empire in order to get discriminating information on Wennerström.

In reality, however, Mikael is hired to unearth the mystery of Vanger’s niece’s disappearance from their small island residence, decades ago. It is believed, by Vanger’s eccentric family – which includes a subdued Stellan Saarsgrad, playing the CEO – that she was killed in cold blood.

While that is established, we get glimpses of Lisbeth’s life. First we’re introduced to her as a tech savvy hacker, who is hired to check Mikael’s background before he was approached by Henrik’s lawyer, Frode (Steven Berkoff). Then, she is revealed as a disturbed girl who is still the ward of the state because of her mental instability.

Lisbeth is a complex character that doesn’t say much. Striving for the state’s money to survive, she’s sexually abused by her new guardian. Lisbeth and Mikael’s paths arch after a good half of the film has passed and characters are fully established, thanks to the screenplay by Steven Zillian (Gladiator, Moneyball). The same is true for the edgy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Directed with craftiness that comes from honing top-notch thrillers like Se7en and Zodiac, David Fincher has the uncanny talent of laying out terror and debauchery of violence in his films. He unflinchingly amplifies those in this film. Make no mistake, the film is strictly rated R. Rooney Mara is a powerhouse as Lisbeth. Her anorexic pale state, harshly cut jet black Mohawk and countless piercing bemoans anguish.

Daniel Craig, playing a subdued detective, effectively carries out his role – almost making me forget he is the reintroduced James Bond of our times. In one scene, he almost cries, as Lisbeth stiches a gash on his forehead.

The girl with the dragon tattoo is an intelligently crafted thriller that knows how to pace itself in its running time of 158 minutes, without falling into cliché, mediocrity or absurdity. The film is rated R for strong sexual content, gruesome torture and flashes of unrelenting violence.