In the closing scene of Niels Arden Oplev's Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2009), the film's principal female character, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), steps from a limousine onto a seaside promenade. She walks down the promenade, away from the camera. The scene depicts Salander as a femme fatale through cinematography and costuming. As the scene begins, the camera is positioned on the passenger side of the car; the driver-side door opens and the chauffeur rises and steps back to open the door for his passenger. The camera moves to the driver's side, tilting down to ground level, then rising from Salander's stiletto heel, over the car door to her face, shielded by large sunglasses. The camera movement from her legs to her face recalls the angular cinematography of film noir. It also works to lay stress on her costume of stiletto heels, black stockings, business suit, heavy make-up and platinum blonde wig – a costume that differs from her appearance in the rest of the film. The scene then moves to a medium shot of Salander paying the chauffer, then to a final long shot of her walking down the promenade, refusing to yield the pavement to conversing businessmen. Salander got the money, and got away with it. Does her costume in the concluding scene reveal what Salander has always been, a femme fatale? Or is it a ‘costume’, which dissimulates, obscuring another identity? Why does the film close on a citation of the noir repertoire? Such questions presume more fundamental ones. What is the genealogy of film noir in Nordic cinema? Where does the femme fatale fit into Nordic cinema? These questions take on special interest because the term ‘Nordic noir’ has gained currency as the catch-all term for crime fiction on page, screen and television from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.

While film noir is a minor tradition in Nordic cinema, neo-noir has come to figure prominently, as we see in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. All the Nordic cinemas (except that of Iceland) produced films during the 1940s and 1950s, which scholars and critics would later come to see as films noirs.