Though it disguises itself quite well as a conventional mystery, there’s a great deal more going on in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo than might appear on the surface. Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally popular trilogy has been adapted into a trio of films, all of which were released in Europe last year. This, the first of the series, is opening in the U.S. this weekend. While Larsson packs his story with all the standard tropes he learned from a lifetime of devouring American and British mystery novels, it’s the way he twists those conventions around to critique the misogynist and corporate-influenced shortcomings of Swedish society that really sets them apart.

Indeed, the film’s Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women, is far more blunt in advertising what the story is about. This is a film about not one, but two investigations: a journalist’s inquiry into a cold case, the disappearance of a young girl decades before, as well as a look, by Larsson and the filmmakers, into violence against women on a larger scale. It works excellently as both.

The main story introduces Mikael (Michael Nyqvist), a writer — much like Larsson himself — for a left-wing magazine. The film opens as he is sentenced to prison for libeling a wealthy businessman. Though he was set up, he decides to serve the three-month sentence and put the whole ordeal behind him. But through some oddity in the Swedish penal system, he has six months of freedom before he has to serve his time. After sentencing, he is immediately contacted by an elderly industrialist, Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who admires his investigative tenacity and asks Mikael to use that six months to look into the mysterious and unsolved disappearance of his niece over forty years ago.