If only Miss Marple had been a bisexual biker with multiple piercings, a criminal record, and a long lick of oil-black hair over one eye, she might have solved a few more crimes. Those are the accoutrements with which Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is decked out in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and they stand her in good stead for the unpicking of clues. Lisbeth has a gift for computer hacking, plus an ability to trawl briskly through printed files, and I found it endearing that, even as the movie tries to rough us up with tales of fascists, dildos, woodland snipers, and exploding cars, the main lesson that we come away with is: there’s nothing like a day in the archives.

Lisbeth is one of a pair of sleuths. Her partner is Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist with Millennium magazine, in Stockholm, who is hired by an aging industrialist named Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) to investigate a vanishing. Forty years ago, his niece Harriet went missing from the island where he lives, during a meeting of the Vanger clan. (The bridge connecting them to the mainland was, of course, closed that day: a variant on the old standby of the locked room.) Henrik believes that she was murdered, and he suspects every member of his scowling family. At one point, the surviving relatives even gather in a drawing room, with Blomkvist present, and for a few minutes we are indeed back in the hermetic world of Agatha Christie. Is this film really as murky and modern as it thinks it is?

There is no doubting the cunning of the director, Niels Arden Oplev. He has constructed a long film, running more than two and a half hours, so as to make it feel like a short and speedy one. Both the editing and the music rattle along at quite a clip, and even patches of dogged research are whipped into unlikely fervor. The most elegant of these is Blomkvist’s scanning of old negatives: grainy shots of Harriet, in the crowd at a parade, which, when blown up and placed in quick sequence, suddenly assume the shape of a mini-movie. I am a sucker for these smaller narratives, crouched and concealed within the larger quest; the problem comes as they start to swell and delay the Vanger plot. First, we get a prologue in which Blomkvist is found guilty of libel in an unconnected matter, involving another wealthy public figure, and sent to jail. (The sentence is delayed for six months, which gives him time to solve the case of the disappearing girl.) Second, Lisbeth, who has unspecified convictions in her past, has a new probation officer, who forces her to provide sexual services in return for a financial allowance; thus humiliated, she turns the tables, and basically rapes him back. This frees her up to resume control of her own money, which buys her a new laptop, which allows her to hack into Blomkvist’s own computer—for no apparent reason other than sheer nosiness—all of which inspires him to take her on as a deputy. Got that?

The result of these shenanigans is to yank our two heroes together, not before time, in a cottage on the Vanger estate. Say what you like about Holmes and Watson, at least they took no more than a page to shake hands and agree to share lodgings. Why, then, should Oplev delve so deep into backstories? Why can’t Lisbeth, if her old laptop is broken, claim a new one, using a quaint process that the rest of us call “insurance,” and thus save herself the bother of being tortured? The answer is that Oplev has not just thrills to purvey but anxieties to air. His film is an adaptation of the novel by the late Stieg Larsson, the first of a trilogy, which has sold by the wagonload around the world. Larsson was a reporter, like Blomkvist; he specialized in exposing the activities of the far right, and his fiction is concerned, to the brink of obsession, with cruelties of every stripe. The Swedish title of the book translates as “Men Who Hate Women,” and Lisbeth’s private history—which, unsurprisingly, was riven by familial abuse—is linked to the Vanger saga not by any causal logic but simply by a vague, insistent dread of the tyrannical.

Beneath the sadistic surface, there is a strange cultural masochism in Larsson, as in his compatriot Henning Mankell, whose collected works I once feasted on through a single winter, with the kind of gusto that only crime fiction can excite. It is as though both men want not merely to disassemble the reputation of their homeland as a model—the model—of benign social democracy but to dig backward in a bid to prove that the past, too, was not one of liberal health and justice but a sump of buried transgressions and moral disease. (When you fear for your socialist Eden, the first people you blame, on instinct, will be capitalist dynasts like the Vangers, safe in their havens of corruption.) There can be a twilit sadness to this failing of a myth, explored most beautifully in last year’s “Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared,” by the British author Andrew Brown, who lived there in the nineteen-seventies; but “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” both on the page and onscreen, largely dispenses with the melancholic. The chilly shack where Lisbeth stays with Blomkvist is a comfortless parody of the blissful huts where Ingmar Bergman planted his lovers, in “Summer Interlude” and “Summer with Monika,” and Oplev scorns any hint of relaxation, preferring the stab of high drama: the moment that Blomkvist pinned up a row of photographs, showing the older generation of Vangers, I knew that half of them would turn out to have been Nazis. Was wartime Sweden really just a smaller Germany with added meatballs, or am I missing something?

If regret lingers anywhere in the movie, it is in the landscapes, which feel not just tranquil but furred with cold, as if the whole place, like the princess in a fairy tale, had been trapped in ice. There are further hints of lost happiness in our heroes’ names. People keep addressing Blomkvist as Kalle, for a joke, Kalle Blomkvist being the intrepid boy detective in stories by Astrid Lindgren; as for Lindgren’s more famous creation, Pippi Longstocking, Larsson conceded that a dose of Pippi’s resourcefulness, and her blithe insouciance in the face of civic norms, had crept into the figure of Lisbeth. I see his point, but it’s still a long way from Pippi’s merry orphanhood to the emotional voiding and gothic glare of the woman in this film. And, if Oplev wanted to honor Larsson’s repugnance at misogynist extremes, why did he choose to linger so long, and in such yelping proximity, over the violation scene? Noomi Rapace throws herself into the title role, but something about the conception of her character, and about the far-reaching urgency of the sociopathic shocks behind the killing, smacks of a filmmaker pushing too hard. That is why the movie finds it impossible to wind things up. As we lurch from flash-backs to forward leaps, the final reel makes “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” look as snappy as “Some Like It Hot.” In a rare reflective interlude, Lisbeth says, “You choose who you want to be,” but the rest of the film belies that view, seeing most people, Lisbeth included, as prisoners sealed in their past. It’s a true conundrum, for those who devise mysteries: if the sins of the fathers, or the crimes of the motherland, are always to blame, what happens to pure evil? It could be out of a job.

As the festivity of the Winter Olympics dies away, what is the next extravaganza that Canada has to offer? Welcome to “Chloe,” in which a Toronto-based gynecologist has a lesbian affair with a prostitute whom she suspects of having slept with her husband. If that isn’t a winter sport, I don’t know what is. Not unlike snowboard cross, perhaps, except that these contestants have lunchtime sex in hotels instead of knocking each other helmet first into the slush.

David (Liam Neeson) misses a surprise birthday party thrown for him by his wife, Catherine (Julianne Moore), who doesn’t realize that, for most men, surprise parties are slightly less enjoyable than surprise dentistry. She thinks that he was otherwise engaged, and, in a fit of inquisitive revenge, pays a call girl named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to befriend and tempt him. The befriending gets out of control, but Catherine is so aroused by firsthand accounts of it that she, too, falls into Chloe’s embrace. The movie—directed by Atom Egoyan, who should know better—is closely adapted from “Nathalie,” a French film of 2004, with Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart, but what seemed like standard practice for Parisians comes across here as unsmiling porno-farce. Even the throbbing score, by Mychael Danna, sounds unwittingly risible, and there were times—I refer you to David’s first, salivating gaze at Chloe across a coffee shop—when I felt that we could be watching one of those soft-core cable dramas starring the redoubtable Shannon Tweed, with titles like “Night Raptures IV” or “Executive Sensations.” Wait, if you must, for the DVD, although even then, once you’ve heard the hooker say, “I try and find something to love in everybody,” there is a strong case that “Chloe” should be pulled from your Erotica shelf and moved to Science Fiction. ♦