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The 10 Best Descriptions of What Rooney Mara Looks Like in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Rooney Mara stars in Columbia Pictures'
Rooney Mara stars in Columbia Pictures’ “THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO,” also starring Daniel Craig. Photo: Merrick Morton/Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens this week, and however one feels about the intense violence of the film, its adaptation from the book, or its Swedish predecessor, we can all agree on one thing: Rooney Mara sure does look punked out as Lisbeth Salandar. Our own David Edelstein describes her as “a punked-out waif, as pale and blank as the masked Edith Scob in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face,” and there’s plenty more where that came from. Here are ten of the most wonderful descriptions of just how unusual Mara’s Salander looks in Dragon Tattoo:

10. “Salander is a twenty-four-year-old hacker with many piercings, of herself and of others.” [NYer]

9. “… looking like a malnourished 13-year-old boy whose head has had a mishap with some hedge clippers …” [Globe and Mail UK]

8. “Ms. Mara is a damaged ferret, her eyes darting, her tongue rubbing her stapled lips as she helps the mentally distraught reporter try to make sense of a deepening mystery.” [NYO]

7. “Festooned with multiple piercings, tattoos, a haircut that might pass muster in Borneo and an anti-social attitude that could clear a wide path for her through any crowd.” [THR]

6. “She sports the spiky black plumage of a punkette peacock, with oversize earrings tightened onto her lobes like gears, pale-gray skin set off by barely perceptible eyebrows, choppy bangs, and piercings she wears like scars. Even when Lisbeth is standing still, her whole look is really an act of violence.” [EW]

5. “With her multiple piercings, a cadaverous pallor and a hermetic demeanor, Lisbeth is the sort of weirdo you would cross the street to avoid.” [Miami Herald]

4. “… she could be a figure from Ingmar Bergman’s medieval morality play The Seventh Seal: death’s kid sister.” [Time]

3.”… a pixieish polysexual outlier who seems equipped with her own portable storm cloud.” [Christian Science Monitor]

2. “”Mara, pierced and punked-out, is Lisbeth Salander, the asocial, bisexual genius hacker and misfit - one of the great heroines of detective fiction, as different from Miss Marple as a toot of crank is to a nice cup of tea.” [Philadelphia Inquirer]

1. “… [she looks] like she’s starring in a paramilitary Nine Inch Nails production of “Les Miz.’’” [Boston Globe]

The 10 Best Descriptions of What Rooney Mara Looks Like in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo