Starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist. In Swedish, Italian, and French with English subtitles. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, July 9, at the Fifth Avenue Theatres and the Cinemark Tinseltown

Honestly, who knew the Swedes were so twisted? Okay, yeah, those IKEA instructions for putting together a file cabinet in your living room clearly come from some freaking fiendish minds. But—hold onto your lingonberries—the only thing that could maybe prepare you for the dark, devious entertainment that is The Girl Who Played With Fire is its dark, devious predecessor, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. What, you haven’t recovered from that one yet? Spí¤dbarn. That’s Swedish for “baby”.

In that first film based on the late Stieg Larsson’s crime novels, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), the tatted, pierced, bisexual, goth-punk-brainiac-hacker-asskicker heroine, teamed with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) to track a decades-old mystery and hunt down some serious creeps. This time, there’s sordid stuff involving sex-slave trafficking, murder, and more depraved evildoers crawling out of the Nordic-noir darkness. Incidentally, these include a sadistic rapist, a maimed former Soviet spy, and a sinister, blond man-giant who feels no pain—and that’s got nothing to do with imbibing too many cocktails. The man-giant reminds you of the Jaws character in The Spy Who Loved Me—except that watching Roger Moore getting tossed around like a limp doll was cheesy fun, while similar activities here make you feel sickly fascinated and forget to breathe.

Luckily, director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg make the gritty terrain of Stockholm and rural Sweden no country for James Bond. Although maybe a tad less jaw-walloping than the first flick, this sneaky, nasty nerve jangler wholly belongs to Rapace’s cooler-than-you, dragon-inked Lisbeth, hands-down the most original movie heroine to watch as she deftly tasers misogynistic shitheads. The sweet geek-love connection between Lisbeth and Mikael does soften the female-revenge angle, but, frankly, it still seems like every girl should pack her stun gun when visiting Sweden.