THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Girl with the Needle, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

By the time the real horror of The Girl with the Needle arrives, it is just another awful part—albeit an especially heinous one—of the lives of its characters, living in Copenhagen at the end and in the aftermath of the Great War. Our main character finds herself in that final predicament because she believes she has no other choice. After she realizes the full truth of her situation, there are no other options for her but to stay, to go along with it as much as her conscience will allow, and to hope some escape will present itself. It hasn't until now, but surely, there must be some limit to what fate has in store for her.

Co-writer/director Magnus von Horn's film is oppressive from its opening scenes, which give us a sense of the life of Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a woman living and working at a textile factory in the city, circa 1918. Her apartment is just a single room, where she previously lived with her husband until he was conscripted into the army. It has been a year since Karoline has had any word from him, and even though she and everyone else believes he has died in the war effort, the two are still officially married in the eyes of the law. Applying for widow's benefits from the government or her employer, in order to help her pay rent, is out of the question, then.

She quickly loses the apartment, to a woman with a young child and who likely has received the benefits denied to Karoline, so she finds a new place, even smaller and dirtier than the old one, and keeps working. There's no reprieve or sense of hope in sight for this woman, and that becomes the pattern of the story.

The despair is briefly broken on occasion. The first break comes from Karoline's boss Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), who owns the factory and finds sympathy in her story—caught between her marital status and stuck along the edges of society. The two spend time together, and Jørgen seems genuinely affectionate of Karoline. They plan to marry, but then, his mother, a noblewoman with a rigid belief in social hierarchy, refuses her son's engagement to Karoline. The main reason for the hasty courtship, by the way, is that Karoline is pregnant, so that's just a new problem for her to face.

The husband, named Peter (Besir Zeciri), returns, but Karoline doesn't recognize him. He was wounded in combat, leaving his face disfigured and covered with a mask to lessen the shock for everyone else. Peter's a good man, it seems, who wants to continue the marriage, raise the baby with Karoline, and provide whatever life he can for the three of them.

She doesn't want the baby, though, and an attempt to cause a miscarriage at a local bathhouse catches the attention of Dagmar (Trine Dryholm), a woman who helps other women with unwanted pregnancies or infants find new homes for those children. When the time comes, Dagmar insists Karoline come to the candy store she owns—with a fee for her services, of course, because charity, like everything else in this place and at this time, isn't cheap.

This is all a matter of plotting, of course, but it's important to establish, if only to solidify just how hopeless and helpless Karoline's situation becomes. Von Horn and cinematographer Michal Dymek shoot the film in a monochrome that favors blacks and dark grays, as if there's little physical light to shine upon the darkness of these lives, and in a boxy aspect ratio that confines the characters even further within their surroundings. The color and framing here complement and heighten the atmosphere, as well as the feeling that there is nothing else to this world but shadows of people's cruelty, the desperation of those on the fringes, and society's indifference to such people.

Karoline does give her baby to Dagmar, who promises to find the child a home with a doctor or a lawyer, and still owing the woman money and being without a home again after leaving Peter, she asks to work for the off-the-books adoption agent as a wetnurse. Dagmar doesn't see the need, since she moves babies surprisingly quickly, but she lets Karoline do that work and gives her a room in which she can stay.

The rest of the story builds toward that horrifying revelation. It won't be told here, because, even though the real-life case must be notorious in the film's native Denmark, it's not one of internationally common knowledge. On its face, the truth here is unthinkable. Within the context of Karoline's experience and the portrayal of this society at this moment in time, it ultimately feels like the inevitable outcome of people needing to put hope in a simple, if unlikely, solution, as well as yet another person taking advantage of the desperate, the outcast, and those who have no options.

There's a clear-cut villain in this story, but von Horn and co-screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen's accusations spread wider than just one person. That individual, after all, gained the nihilistic philosophy at the core of these deeds from somewhere, just as, in one particularly chilling moment, a little girl must have learned how to rid herself of a perceived problem by example. The Girl with the Needle doesn't sympathize with this particular figure, pulled from the pages of Danish history, but it does understand and show how desperation, cruelty, and apathy fester, until the only option remaining would have been unthinkable—except that it is the only one left.

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