Advertising itself in that unforgettable first trailer as "The Feel-Bad Movie of Christmas," David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is on its way to trade all the holly-jolly feelings of the holiday season for a snowy, violent story about a murder investigation in northern Sweden. Fincher's adaptation of the bestselling Stieg Larsson novel has been on top of our list of the most anticipated films of the year for months now, and now we've got two new images of the film's main characters, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) and Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) to keep that anticipation going. Take a look at them below. You can also click on them to see even higher-res versions.





By now you're probably very familiar with the image of Lisbeth Salander, the leather-wearing, pierced hacker who finds herself striking up an unlikely friendship with Blomkvist, a journalist assigned by a wealthy industrialist (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the murder of his niece Harriet 40 years earlier. Mara's pale face and bleached blond eyebrows have been central to the movie's marketing over the last few months, and both of these images show you just how intense her transformation is-- it's hard to even remember that this is the same girl who told off Mark Zuckerberg in the opening scene of The Social Network.

The first of these images especially does a great job conveying in a single shot the relationship that Blomkvist and Salander build-- if you've read the books you know what I mean, and if not, you'll surely find out soon. And the hazy, dim light here is more evidence that Fincher and his cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth are once again working together to prove how gorgeous digital photography can be when done right.

You can see higher-res versions of these and all the other Dragon Tattoo images we have in our Blend Film Database. The movie comes to theaters on December 21.