The Girl With The Needle Review
Poor, lonely factory worker Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) has a difficult life in Copenhagen during the waning days of WW1, but things start to look up for her when she catches the eye of her handsome boss, Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup). The two begin an illicit affair, and before too long, Karoline finds herself pregnant. Desperately in love with Jorgen, she assumes that he’ll do the right thing, and make an honest woman of her.
Turns out, it was the wrong assumption, and soon – pregnant, alone, and out of a job – Karoline is worse off than ever. Help seems to be at hand when she runs into the apparently kindly Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who offers to find a nice family to adopt her baby… but is she as trustworthy as she seems?
The Girl With The Needle is the third feature from Swedish director Magnus Van Horn, and it could hardly be more different from his second, the contemporary, candy-coloured Sweat. Van Horn’s newest movie is a period piece shot in crisp, sometimes expressionistic black and white – however grim the action is (and it does get very grim), it remains a beautiful film to look at (hat tip to cinematographer Michal Dymek). Many of the shots evoke famous works of silent cinema, like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.
From its earliest scenes, The Girl With The Needle presents itself as the darkest of dark fairytales, with our poor heroine having to battle her way through a forest of increasingly monstrous forces with the ever-diminishing hope of finding her happy ever after. The early desertion of her lover seems like a walk in the park compared to what comes after.
And as such, it makes for a very difficult watch. Van Horn’s film is loosely based on the real case of Dagmar Overbye, who remains Denmark’s most prolific serial killer more than a century after her murder spree. To divulge the specificities of her crimes would be a spoiler – she’s easily googleable, if you’re so inclined – but they are truly heinous. Van Horn walks a careful tightrope, depicting the atrocities enough to illustrate their horror, without treating them gratuitously; the disconcerting atmosphere he’s carefully weaved up to the point of the reveal means that he doesn’t have to do a lot to get there. He’s also helped by a terrific performance from Trine Dyrholm, who wears an expression of hyper-intense blankness that is often the single most unsettling thing about any single scene.
Though it’s a sensitive treatment of unimaginable crimes, during the second half of the movie, those horrors do start to dampen any narrative progression or propulsion. The Girl With The Needle moves quickly to begin with, but the closer we get to the abyss, the slower we move, until the entirety of the film becomes swallowed up by the darkness; there’s no longer any room for Karoline, or her journey. The movie gets lost in its own nightmare.
Still, it looks incredible from the first scene to the last, and proves that Magnus Van Horn is a director who will refuse to be pigeonholed. Where will he go next?
★★★
