The Girl in the Spider's Web

I am of the opinion that Hannibal Lecter, as created by Thomas Harris and played by Anthony Hopkins, is the greatest embodiment of pure evil in genre fiction or films. So much of what was first frightening about Lecter came from how opaque the character is. That is, from the way that Harris and The Silence of the Lambs filmmakers removed context from Lecter's actions. Unfortunately Harris, in his own slow way, couldn't stop writing about Lecter - Hannibal was published 18 years after Lecter made his debut in Red Dragon - and Hollywood couldn't stop adapting. I know people who make great claims for the Hannibal television series (which I sampled) , but the idea of Lecter as a weekly character who had backstory and a job and co-workers played as highly overthought to me. Does anyone remember Hannibal Rising?

All of the above to say that Lisbeth Salander, the punk/hacker/detective created in novels by the late Stieg Larsson, is in danger of crossing into the territory of the overexplained. Moviegoers in the States who haven't read Larsson's trilogy will be know Lisbeth through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher's 2011 film of Larsson's first novel. (All three books have Swedish film versions as well, starring Noomi Rapace.) Rooney Mara played Lisbeth as a pure avenging spirit whose retributive attacks on violent men were all the more frightening for their coldness. The new The Girl in the Spider's Web, directed by Fede Alvarez,  is based on a book credited to David Lagercrantz from Larsson's notes. Lisbeth is here played by Claire Foy, showing off her versatility in an awards season that will likely see her Oscar-nominated for First Man. Foy is an excellent actor who is more than capable of playing the anger and pain under Lisbeth's surface, and here she is certainly asked to do just that.

The problems of Spider's Web are numerous, but they aren't Foy's fault. The plot involves a computer program allowing one to launch nuclear weapons, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason), a genius child (Christopher Convery), and Lisbeth's long-missing sister Camilla (Sylvia Hoeks from Blade Runner 2049). Lisbeth escaped their father's sexual abuse but Camilla did not, and the suggestion that the sisters are but two sides of the same damaged coin is a reductive conceit. Camilla runs a crime ring that wants the computer program, and Lisbeth has been hired to steal it from the Americans by its nervous creator. (Stephen Merchant). None of this detail signifies very much, but rather it gives Foy excuses to fight and shoot and glower. The two sisters face off as they must, and Lisbeth's vulnerability - while well played - isn't anything we haven't seen before. In order to carry on Larsson's work the writers and filmmakers behind Spider's Web had to fill in Lisbeth's story, and the result is a Lisbeth who is angry and sad in ways that people who have been hurt are every day. But Larsson's Lisbeth isn't fully of this world, and it is that otherness as embodied by Mara and Rapace that makes her iconic. Now, we have more and more isn't better.