Brimming with atmospheric foreboding and grime-covered poverty, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is a stark examination at urban European life in the years following World War I, but it’s also so much more. Loosely based on the downfall of Denmark’s most prolific serial killer, The Girl with the Needle continually surprises in nearly every way that a film can, and that it does so with the artistic vision of Ingmar Bergman and the surreal wit of David Lynch makes it one of the year’s best films, and one of the year’s most disturbing.
The film’s first half follows Karoline (a beautifully expressive Vic Carmen Sonne), a near destitute factory seamstress who falls in love with her wealthy boss Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) who genuinely seems to share in her affections. After becoming pregnant, social and economic class obedience eventually forces Karoline out of Jørgen’s life, leaving her alone, with child, and out of options. When a desperate act facilitates a chance meeting with an older woman named Dagmar (a passively sinister Trine Dyrholm) Karoline sees a way out of her fraught situation and is even offered a job.
As it turns out, Dagmar operates an illegal adoption agency out of the apartments above her candy shop. Now free of the responsibilities of child-rearing, Karoline offers her services as a wet nurse for the children Dagmar takes in, but something isn’t quite right. Plenty of unwed mothers come around looking for a solution to their problems, but very few families arrive in search of children to adopt. Be warned, Dagmar’s response to this mysterious imbalance of supply and demand is quite grisly indeed.
While The Girl with the Needle may spare us the gore, it makes up for its lack of literal carnage with a barrage of unsettling, yet gorgeously presented black and white cinematography, courtesy of Michał Dymek. Every speck of mud and every unclean garment is somehow highlighted to exemplify the poverty and desperation felt by these characters, and every shadow hides the unknown trauma of a thousand more stories. The imagery is so visceral that, with not much effort, you can almost smell the coal burning and the rubbish left out to rot. And if that weren’t enough, you can also taste the ether.
The Girl with the Needle may build its narrative on the backbone of a famous Danish serial killer, but, more than anything, it’s a comment on the desperate lives of the poor and the things they’re willing to overlook (knowingly or otherwise) for even a chance of escape. It’s easy to fool yourself in the face of such overpowering hopelessness, but through one hell of a dark fable, von Horn demonstrates that misery isn’t always the only option.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.