There’s no kindness without cruelty, and no joy without sorrow, in The Girl with the Needle, Magnus von Horn’s oppressively bleak inspired-by-real-events tale of female misery in post-WWI Denmark.
This poignantly pain-stricken black-and-white period piece is not without its brief moments of hope. Yet they only emerge at the end of an arduous portrait of one woman’s efforts to find the comfort and love she craves—a mission that ultimately puts her into contact with an unconventional serial killer. Premiering at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it’s as grim, and transfixing, as they come.
In a Copenhagen that frequently resembles a medieval village, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) works in a sewing factory that doesn’t pay her enough to afford her flat, from which she’s unceremoniously evicted at the film’s outset by a landlord who can no longer allow his compassion to overshadow his need for rent. This opening calamity is shot by von Horn in harried 4:3 handheld that puts a premium on movement and, in particular, Karoline’s feet—an ironic commentary on the lack of social mobility in this early 20th-century society.
For Karoline, whose husband has not returned from the war, there’s simply struggle, and Sonne’s eyes (twice spied in ultra-close-up) radiate intense anguish and weariness, Even so, she’s momentarily heartened by a meeting with the factory’s tall, dapper boss Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), who denies her request for widower’s compensation (since her spouse has not been found) but kindly agrees to further inquire into her husband’s whereabouts.
A still from The Girl With the Needle
Courtesy of TIFFJørgen walks with a cane and The Girl with the Needle subtly implies that his disability is part of the reason he sympathizes with the put-upon Karoline. A meeting in a park (during which he buys her chestnuts) is followed by sex in a public stairwell and, then, gifts and intimacy. However, while this initially suggests a potential Cinderella-ish future for Karoline, things fall apart fast, beginning with the reappearance of her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who wears an unnerving mask that covers three-quarters of his scarred face.
Peter’s haunting visage is matched by creepy breathing and squishy mouth noises that, together, mark him as a monstrous specter from the past. Karoline swiftly throws him out of her dingy flat, where the floors are grimy and the sole window doesn’t open without great effort. Desperate because she’s now pregnant, she compels Jørgen to marry her.
Their engagement initiates a meeting with the businessman’s imperious mother, who coldly has a doctor confirm Karoline’s with-child status via a gynecological exam and subsequently makes clear to both that no wedding will take place. Having arrived with awestruck delight at a mansion she thought would be her home, Karoline leaves alone, forced to find a way to survive on her own.
A chance sighting of a poster reveals that Peter is now performing as a “freak” in a traveling circus. Visiting the show, she witnesses the nastiness of the crowd and the quiet dignity of her husband, and the compassion she shows him on stage sparks a reunion. No sooner have things brightened, though, than laborious childbirth arrives, taking place on a bed of potatoes at her place of work as a stranger delivers her infant and colleagues look on with fascination.
As befitting The Girl with the Needle’s dourness, the positive is inevitably soured by the negative, with Karoline incapable of stomaching motherhood and seeking the services of Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a sweets shop owner whom she had previously met at a bathhouse where Karoline had tried to end her pregnancy with a long sewing needle.
“It makes sense that we help each other,” Dagmar told her during that fateful encounter, and help Dagmar does, for Karoline and the many other single mothers who seek her adoption services. For a fee, Dagmar takes Karoline’s unnamed infant girl and promises to place her in the home of good people such as doctors and lawyers. “You’ve done the right thing,” Dagmar tells a distraught Karoline.
Unable to completely let go, however, Karoline returns the next day. While her daughter is already gone, she convinces Dagmar to let her pay off the remainder of her debt by nursing the agency’s other babies. Dagmar agrees, so long as Karoline also breastfeeds her adolescent daughter Erena (Avo Knox Martin).
Light is snuffed out by darkness at every dank, disgusting, deviant turn in The Girl with the Needle. Sexual danger, destitution, and death are constant threats for Karoline, and the fear they inspire drive her to accept Dagmar’s morphine and ether, which temporarily provide “calm” amidst the never-ending storm.
Director von Horn shoots Karoline either walking away from or toward (and/or staring directly at) his camera—heightening empathy with her torturous plight—and he and cinematographer Michał Dymek flip-flop between shallow and deep focus to augment the overarching mood of alienation and disorientation. Frederikke Hoffmeier’s score, highlighted by a single, jarring bass note, further amplifies the nightmarishness of this narrative, whose up-close-and-personal depiction of subjugation and desolation peaks with revelations about Dagmar’s true conduct—and, in a chilling climactic scene, her defiance in the face of condemnation.
Men prove largely peripheral figures in The Girl with the Needle, as von Horn’s story posits women as both victims and victimizers—a situation that speaks to the film’s commingling of good and bad, right and wrong, innocence and guilt.
In a world this forlorn, benevolence invariably takes terrible form, and the director echoes that sentiment with aesthetics that lend the action an equal measure of stark realism and hazy dreaminess. Like the unholy offspring of Mike Leigh and David Lynch, it operates in a mesmerizing purgatorial register between the sacred and the profane, although holiness is in short supply until the proceedings’ finale, when Karoline, having endured a figurative trial by fire—stained by an actual, unthinkable conflagration—opts to reject futility in favor of faith.
Not once does The Girl with the Needle play as a polemic; von Horn diligently avoids on-the-nose comments or developments that might draw direct lines between its then and our now. Nonetheless, there’s piercing timeliness to this heartbreaking horror story, encapsulated by a late, thousand-mile stare and ensuing, closed-eyes embrace by Karoline—a woman whose salvation only comes at the conclusion of immense, unfair suffering.
