If many genres of popular art provide an index to their time and place, the film of Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," suggests that contemporary Sweden differs a good deal from the country dedicated moviegoers know from the oeuvre of Ingmar Bergman. Revered by intellectuals, art-house patrons, and Woody Allen, his pictures tend to feature tight close-ups of intense, unhappy Scandinavians talking endlessly in Swedish about their neuroses in dark rooms, something one might experience on a visit to a small town in northern Minnesota. Although bright, sunny, and quite pretty, unlike the master's work, the new film shows a whole culture burdened with a troubling history and permeated by a multiplicity of corruptions.

Following its source, the movie intertwines three stories that eventually merge into a coherent whole. An elderly industrialist named Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who annually receives a mysterious flower in the mail, hires an investigative journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), to solve a very personal case, the disappearance 40 years ago of his beloved niece Harriet. Vanger offers Blomkvist a handsome sum, puts him up in a cabin on the island his family owns, and supplies him with boxes of relevant material from the past.

At the same time the title character, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a computer whiz who does research for a security company, hacks into Blomkvist's files and starts to assist him in his investigation of the disappearance and, ultimately, in a case of slander for which he faces a prison sentence. Eventually teaming up, in more ways than one, Lisbeth and Mikael discover a number of layers of crime in the Vanger family, in corporate capitalism, and by association, in Swedish society itself.

The Sweden of the movie differs from the peaceful, enlightened nation of popular belief, exhibiting instead a pervasive corruption, violence, and perversion. Except for Henrik, the Vanger family, for example, includes members of the Swedish Nazi Party who fought for the Germans in World War II, a case of multiple incest, a psychopath or two, and a couple of serial killers.

The criminality extends beyond the Vangers through other levels of society. Lisbeth suffers a random beating from a trio of drunken thugs in the Stockholm subway and a vicious rape by a sadistic lawyer serving as her legal guardian/probation officer, a figure apparently mandated by Swedish law for her response to sexual abuse in the past. She concocts a clever and entirely appropriate revenge on the sadist that, however, deepens the subtext of sexual perversion lurking beneath the surface of the detective plot.

That plot develops gradually as the journalist pieces together a jigsaw puzzle of seemingly disconnected details from a number of sources to solve the 40-year-old mystery of Harriet's disappearance. As it should, the sheer process of investigation provides much of the movie's appeal, something like the photographic analysis of both "Blowup" and "Blow Out." It concludes with a wildly exaggerated sequence of struggle and torture that reinforces the pervasive sexual sadism and reveals the answers to all the mysteries.

The crosscutting between the separate but connected plots mirrors the frequent contrasts between rural and urban landscapes, the island where Mikael works for Vanger and the offices and apartments of Stockholm, where Lisbeth plies her highly illegal trade. The movie shows the island in winter and spring, a place of austere beauty in the middle of a dark lake, perched against a background of snowy mountains, beneath an intensely blue Arctic sky.

Noomi Rapace impersonates Lisbeth Sanders, the girl with the dragon tattoo, as if born for the role. A computer geek bristling with attitude, dressed in leather, sporting enough piercings to set off an airport security alarm, beautifying herself with High Gothic cosmetics, and freezing her face into a corpselike deadpan, she radiates an admirably unchanging hostility, apparently hating everything and everyone she encounters with democratic equality.

The long, complicated narrative never sags into dullness or repetition. The beauty of the photography, the novelty of the setting, the close attention to process, and the absolute perfection of Noomi Rapace's interpretation of the title role combine to make "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" a most unusual and highly original mystery.