The bleakness of Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is intimate and inescapable. Loosely inspired by the story of Dagmar Overbye, a Danish child caretaker turned serial killer in the 1920s, von Horn has crafted an unearthly portrait of survival in a society built to fail its most vulnerable, anchored by standout performances from Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne.
The film drags us into the suffocating gloom of early 20th-century Copenhagen — you can practically smell the soot and the delectable assortment of body odours. Comparisons to Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole are inevitable, given its obsessive focus on desperation, moral rot, and the crushing weight of systemic failure. Yet, unlike the brutality of Balagov’s vision, this one wraps its bleakness in a strange, almost ferocious empathy for the forgotten souls it scrutinises (though that empathy might be overshadowed by a melange of disturbing imagery you’ll wish you could scrub from your memory with industrial-strength bleach).
From the first frame, von Horn makes it clear that the world his characters inhabit is unremittingly hostile, dripping with sweat, grime, and menace. The city itself is a montage of silhouettes, captured in a strikingly bleak, high-contrast black-and-white by Michał Dymek, that calls to mind the claustrophobia of German Expressionism. Every frame looks like a vintage photograph that someone forgot to dust, its cracks and shades inundating what little hope exists.
Copenhagen itself feels like it might just swallow its impoverished inhabitants whole. The city is rendered as a soul-sucking burg of narrow alleys and cramped, dilapidated rooms, while Frederikke Hoffmeier’s droning dissonance of a score only exacerbates the sense of entrapment.
A still from ‘The Girl with the Needle’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
The story centers on Vic Carmen Sonne’s Karoline, who is scraping by on the razor’s edge of destitution. Her husband, presumed dead in the Great War, returns disfigured and alien — a ghost of a marriage that once was. Her attempts to climb out of poverty get thwarted at every turn: eviction looms, employment dissolves, and a fleeting affair with her wealthy boss culminates in rejection. Alone and pregnant in a world that sneers at her predicament, she stumbles through life with wavering determination. It is in this desperation that she encounters Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a seemingly benevolent caretaker with a simple business proposition: hand over the child for a fee, and it will be placed in a respectable home.
Sonne’s performance is unpolished and immediate, her hollow-eyed gaze conveying a weariness that words cannot, and her gaunt face and pyretic outbursts speak volumes about a life defined by deprivation. Even as her choices are dictated by the oppressive structures around her, Sonne still imbues Karoline with a sense of agency, and her arc soon evolves from that of survival to redemption.
However, Von Horn’s portrayal of Dagmar is where the film achieves its most disquieting brilliance. Dyrholm’s restraint is utterly unnerving, and she disappears entirely into this woman who has found a way to survive in a world that offers her no kindness. A veneer of maternal concern masks something far insidious, but Dyrholm never lets Dagmar fall prey to caricature. She is terrifying because she is comprehensible.
Von Horn and co-writer Line Langebek take a calculated risk in shifting much of the narrative focus away from Dagmar and onto Karoline. The choice transforms the film from a simple recounting of infamous crimes into something more layered. Karoline becomes a surrogate for the many women whom Dagmar preyed upon — poor, desperate, and abandoned by a society unwilling to make space for their existence. By aligning our perspective with Karoline’s, von Horn’s moral calculus balances the stories of the women crushed beneath the weight of patriarchal indifference, as well as the woman who became their executioner.
A still from ‘The Girl with the Needle’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI
By the time the film lurches toward its inevitably grim conclusion, it sheds any pretense of subtlety and embraces the tropes of gothic horror with surprising finesse — managing, somehow, to outclass Robert Eggers’ recent meanderings in the genre. Still, von Horn dangles a sliver of light, as Karoline teeters on the brink of a choice: to perpetuate the machinery of cruelty or finally, mercifully, shatter it.
The Girl with the Needle is not, by any stretch, a comfortable watch. Nor does it care to be. Its unflinching gaze at the intersections of poverty, gender, and systemic violence cuts provocatively close to the marrow of our present moment. There are no lofty philosophical or moral overtures. Just the ugly, unvarnished reality that society has no use for women like Karoline and Dagmar. They are discarded, methodically disassembled and repurposed in grotesque ways that make their pain even more unbearable.
Today, with the sovereignty of women’s bodies under an insidious siege, The Girl with the Needle is sounding the alarm far louder than anyone seems willing to admit. History isn’t so much past as it is perpetually lurking, waiting to remind us just how little we’ve learned.
The Girl with the Needle is currently streaming on MUBI
Published – January 23, 2025 04:52 pm IST
World cinema
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reviews
