Was there a cat in the Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? If there was, it was for some reason not as memorable as the one featured in the David Fincher adaptation. Noomi Rapace may have been more catlike than Rooney Mara, but there was just something about Daniel Craig yelling “CAT!!!” into the frigid vastness of his secluded cabin that made it stick with me. It’s actually a pretty nice and subtly stated little relationship that forms between Mikael and this cat, whom he calls Cat, and feeds and pets on occasion. It reveals a bit of the protective and nurturing side to his character, and then provides something of a shock and signs that things are seriously effed up in this neck of the woods when the remains of the cat show up on his doorstep. So maybe the whole thing was an omen. But it was still a welcome change from a species that is usually only featured when baddies need something to stroke.
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