The TimesOnline‘s Daniel Bettridge opens his review with a sentiment that we have no doubt many Dragon Tattoo movie-goers will echo, “I haven’t read Stieg Larsson’s hugely successful book which provides the source material for the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s an oversight that I’m planning to remedy with immediate effect.”

It makes sense – you can’t watch this film (or read the book, for that matter) without wanting more. To say Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is addictive is putting it mildly. Here’s the rest of Bettridge’s review…

I suspect I wont be alone in my belated interest in the book but Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev’s adaptation has plenty on offer for both diehard fans and newcomers alike.

For those in need of the crib notes, the movie follows journalist-cum-investigator Mikael Blomkvist, played by Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist who looks like someone has tried to paste Vladimir Putin’s features over Masterchef presenter John Torode’s face.

But I digress. Blomkvist is hired by a tycoon to look into the 40-year-old puzzle of the disappearance and suspected murder of his favourite niece. Eventually Mikael is joined by computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), who is intrigued by the mystery and joins the investigation. Lisbeth, a maladjusted punk, is the real centre of the story however and her troubled and rather brutal personal life is as much a focal point of the movie as the disappearance itself.

The film is a classic whodunnit in the same vein as Bergerac or Murder She Wrote, only it’s filled with the type of brutality and gritty realism you’d expect from modern crime drama. This is in no means a criticism and if like me you enjoy nothing more than a series of clues pinned to a wall and connected by strips of masking tape then you’ll enjoy the investigatory aspect on display here.

The cast is engaging, with Rapace superb throughout, and the talent is well supported by a pitch-perfect score and some breathtaking Nordic backdrops that will leave you trawling the web for cheap city breaks to Malmo. Aside from some rather brutal moments involving Lisbeth’s sadistic guardian early on; it’s a slow burner of a plot, but a genuinely gripping one at that and the director, Oplev, should be praised for maintaining a sense of claustrophobia and nail-biting tension throughout.

Weighing in at a hefty 152 minutes it is perhaps overlong and there will be those that are deterred by the subtitles. But for Buzz readers who are willing to invest, I can heartily recommend The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and would urge you to catch it here in its original state before the inevitable Hollywood remake.