MIFF 2024 | ‘The Girl With the Needle’ review: A bleak look at women’s rights… and women’s wrongs
Magnus von Horn’s Cannes competition debut is a slightly muddled but nonetheless thought-provoking and pertinent arthouse horror hybrid.
Vic Carmen Sonne in “The Girl With the Needle.” Photo courtesy of Melbourne International Film Festival.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark from the outset of Poland-based Swedish director Magnus von Horn’s new film outing. An expressionist nightmare shot in austere monochrome, the film opens with a sequence of faces, double-exposed atop each other, writhing, screaming, and grimacing — think Jonathan Glazer’s “Under The Skin” opening sequence, only seen through the delirious lens of a fever dream, and soundtracked by an anxiety-inducing experimental noise track. This is, as it will turn out, a statement of intent from von Horn. “The Girl With the Needle” is not just about a plucky seamstress frolicking her way through post-war Denmark, as many other seamstresses in post-war period pieces tend to do. No, we are here to witness grief, and horror, and one woman’s personal hell.
Karoline, our titular “girl with the needle,” is not so much a girl as she is a young, desperate working-class woman; played to perfection by Vic Carmen Sonne as the picture of hollow-eyed fatigue. Karoline spends interminable days working her thankless job as a seamstress, which doesn’t even pay her enough to afford rent in the rat-infested bedsit she lives in. Her husband Peter has been unheard from for an entire year, one of the Great War’s many missing men whose absences do not count as deaths, bureaucratically locking her out of any kind of financial support for widows. Salvation seemingly comes in the form of a whirlwind romance with wealthy industrialist Jørgen (an alternately charming and snivelling Joachim Fjeldstrup), but when his promises to marry her after she falls pregnant prove empty, Karoline finds herself heartbroken, destitute, and increasingly out of options.
During a teeth-clenchingly horrifying attempt at inducing an abortion with a knitting needle — of course the titular needle was indeed a macabre Chekhov’s gun of sorts — in a public bath, Karoline is stopped by enigmatic older woman Dagmar (in an astounding performance by Trine Dyrholm), who offers to get her baby adopted for a fee. Unable to pay Dagmar in full, Karoline ends up moving into the back room of the older woman’s sweet shop, paying off her debts by serving as a nursemaid to the babies who have yet to be adopted. But of course, Dagmar is not all she seems, and when Karoline stumbles upon the gruesome secret of her benefactor’s “adoption agency,” she enters into a fraught relationship of uneasy complicity with the woman who has both saved her life and ruined it.
To say that there is no better year for “The Girl With the Needle” to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes is both heartbreaking, and possibly untrue. As women’s rights across the globe continue to erode under pressure from conservative lawmakers, and more women struggle to find adequate healthcare in countries where abortions and/or birth control have been banned, there is no telling how much more pertinent this film would have been next year, or the year after that. Here and now, however, the message comes across loud and clear — in a world where women don’t have rights, how can their acts of desperation be contrived as anything other than wrong?
Cinematographer Michał Dymek is in his element here, framing Karoline and Dagmar’s very different brands of misery within the squalor of Denmark’s post-war slums. Shot after haunting shot of shadowy figures in wooden doorways give real weight to the isolation and paranoia of the women on screen; a particularly uncanny scene sees the whites of Dagmar’s eyes uncannily contrasted against the coal-streaked grey hues of her face and dress, the witch in the candy shop ensnaring her prey. Dymek’s disquieting tableaus are rendered even more potent when paired with Frederikke Hoffmeier’s guttural, nerve-wracking experimental noise score — a welcome move away from the soaring strings and plodding piano pieces often inextricably linked to the period piece genre, and one that elevates the film’s most chilling moments to new and nauseating heights of dread.
To non-Danish viewers, the appearance of a “Based on True Events” title card before the credits roll may prove to be the biggest plot twist that “The Girl With the Needle” has up its sleeve. The handling of the film’s true-crime slant brings up some perplexing questions that dampen the otherwise blunt, sharp shock of the film’s bleak message. Von Horn’s decision to center the film around fictional everywoman Karoline is, at first blush, a respectable one, especially in a media landscape oversaturated with the lionisation of serial killers and the ruthless exploitation of their victims’ surviving families. But is it really that much nicer a decision, when the choice comes down to simply trading one woman’s onscreen exploitation for another’s?
This isn’t to say that there is no place in cinema for exploitation horror — quite the opposite. Exploitation horror is at its best and most empowering in service of a powerful message, but the relentless female suffering that we are subjected to, even in service of a powerful message, is never a great ethical baseline to begin with. So why not craft a more interesting film using its true crime roots, and execute it tactfully with the right amount of research and a tender writer’s hand? An exploration of the real-life, cyclical nature of abuse and poverty through the lens of an existing true-crime figure wouldn’t raise eyebrows unless done poorly, and von Horn’s choice to focus on Karoline’s comparatively less interesting fictional backstory ultimately leads to a sagging second act, a less-than-satisfactory third, and more cinematographic art-house filler than necessary.
For all its faults and idiosyncrasies, the film is still a masterful piece of cinema, and its ending comes as a much-needed hopeful note in a desolate symphony of pain. Equal parts poignant and forlorn, “The Girl With the Needle” is undoubtedly the feel-bad movie of this year’s festival circuit, and a strong contender for one of the most depressingly relevant films of our current socio-cultural context.
