In March 2010 a friend and I headed to the Downer Theatre in Milwaukee to see Chloe, the erotic thriller starring Amanda Seyfried as a sex worker who becomes entangled in Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson’s marriage. At least, that’s what the trailer makes it look like, but I can’t be sure because I never saw it. The Downer Theatre had taken Chloe out of rotation that day and replaced it with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Neither my friend nor I had heard of or seen trailers for the , but we were at the theater anyway, so we went in blind. While improved upon the 2009 original in almost every way, the Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist version is still a solid thriller. With no information from the trailer to provide the basic plot points and no visuals as to what I was about to see—violence, computer hacking, men bound and gagged, a creepy family, political intrigue—everything hit with more force, as I had absolutely no idea what would happen to Lisbeth and Mikael, and where they’d wind up. The twisting thriller is arguably one of the better genres to go into with no context, and it made the film that much more riveting. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]
