The current new wave of horror is throwing a lot of creativity and fresh takes at its audience. The Substance went for satirical body horror, Heretic aimed at a hybrid of theological and psychological terror, and the upcoming Nosferatu is promising a return to classical Gothic form. Somewhere between these lies The Girl with the Needle, a bleak and thoroughly absorbing Danish film that sneaks an uncomfortably long peek at a time not too far behind us, which presented challenges sadly not resigned to the past. It is a confrontational piece that explores issues of women’s reproductive rights, and the terrible situations that are forced upon them when those rights are not freely given. It is not a movie with the intention of entertaining its audience, but rather of challenging, reminding, and warning.

What Is ‘The Girl with the Needle’ About?
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Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is an impoverished young woman living in a small factory town in Denmark towards the end of WWI. The opening scene sees her being evicted from the boarding house room she lives in due to considerable rent arrears, and her husband has been lost to the war, but lack of a death certificate makes her ineligible for widow’s benefits. She is alone, poor, cold, and bitter. When she catches the eye of the wealthy factory owner and gets pregnant by him, it seems her luck may be changing, but his Baroness mother dissuades him from marrying Karoline – and this is after she has subjected the young woman to an impromptu pelvic exam on a dining table to confirm her pregnant state. To add insult to injury, she terminates Karoline’s employment at the factory. Meanwhile, her husband returns from the war, alive but certainly not well, wearing a Phantom of the Opera-style mask to hide his severely mutilated face, and suffering from the terrible effects of PTSD.

Pregnant by a man who will not marry her and now unemployed, Karoline tries to abort the pregnancy herself, with a knitting needle in the local bathhouse, where she is stopped and helped by Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm). She advises Karoline to look her up once the baby is born, and she will find a suitable foster family for it – for a fee. She does so, but cannot afford to pay Dagmar, so negotiates an arrangement to be a wet nurse for the babies that pass through Dagmar’s hands, supposedly on their way to loving, wealthy families. As more babies come and go, Karoline encounters troubled women of all varieties, and seems to grow more attached to the idea of short-term surrogate motherhood. But as she becomes more and more entwined with Dagmar and her little baby-shopping enterprise, she learns exactly what happens to the infants once their parents have left them.

‘The Girl with the Needle’ Examines The Psychology of Motherhood
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Karoline begins the story as a jaded and emotionally vacant vessel. She is brash, and gets on with her miserable life, shunning emotional attachments, seemingly just content to survive, like a wild animal. Her pregnancy only serves as a reminder of the happiness that was dangled in front of her and suddenly whipped away, and she feels very little for her baby once she is born. If she cannot terminate, then she will give it away. Of course, her body isn’t so quick to forget, and continues to lactate, forcing her to suffer the pain of engorgement with no baby to feed. When she is deemed too smelly to nurse other children, Dagmar throws her in a bath and scrubs at her – again, like an animal.

What starts as the only conceivable way to pay her debt and ease the postpartum symptoms, slowly develops into a fondness, a protectiveness, a distant motherly instinct. It’s not as simple as a cute baby cooing at her once and her being a changed woman. It’s a growth of character that falls somewhere between biological and psychological, as she finally has the chance to consider what motherhood is, and how it makes her feel. And somehow, that initial animalistic nature of hers melts away to reveal a gentler, more intelligent core – the part that makes her human. This is not to suggest that those who do not feel maternal, or a desire to care for others, are not human, but in Karoline’s case, her arc is to find meaning in an otherwise brutal and bleak existence, and it turns out that providing and protecting is what gives it to her.

‘The Girl with the Needle’ Is a Loving Homage to German Expressionism
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A story as emotional as this requires an artful approach to cinematography and production that creates an immersive world that feels as cold and damned as it looks. The opening scene is a wonderfully surreal exercise, in which faces are projected onto the face of someone else, causing an uncanny distortion, and playing into the idea of who people present themselves as, and who they are underneath. The whole film is in black and white, and so requires much of its lighting department, with skill and precision from Director of Photography Michał Dymek and Production Designer Jagna Dobesz. The use of light, dark and shadow is so integral here to conveying emotion on the deepest level, to the point that just the way a shot is framed and lit gives you a sinking feeling. It is chilly, hostile, and bleak. That look of doom is so perfectly captured, so as to suggest the inner workings of Karoline’s mind.

Don’t look here for outpourings of emotion or lengthy Mike Flanagan-style monologues that verbalize the deepest, darkest secrets and feelings of the characters. Director Magnus Von Horn demonstrates great skill and subtlety with his handling of emotion on the screen, and dedicates himself to a very visual style of storytelling. Meanwhile, Vic Carmen Sonne gives a sensational performance that requires vulnerability and ugliness. In keeping with the German Expressionist style, much weight is pulled by her uninhibited use of facial expression, as well as bold delivery. She loses herself in Karoline, giving herself over to the many unflattering chapters of the story that see her go from animal, to wet nurse, to mother, to figure of morality. It’s an uncompromising performance met well by Trine Dyrholm’s Dagmar, whose superficial respectability offers just enough veil to cover her underlying sharpness.

There is a clanking industrial feel to it all, like a black and white Lowry painting. Buildings are dilapidated, streets are basically just mud, and when the factory workers leave for the day, there is no sense of joy, because they have nothing to look forward to outside work. Karoline is doing heavy manual labor at nine months pregnant, and gives birth on the floor of a factory while the work and noise carries on around her. It seems somewhat inspired by Tess of the d’Urbervilles, with its focus on a poor young woman whose past – particularly in regard to a pregnancy – taints her, but so resigned is she to a life of poverty that she just trudges on, apparently unknowingly, towards a fittingly poetic conclusion.

‘The Girl with the Needle’ Is Based on a True Story
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The end credits start with ‘Inspired by True Events’. Of course, this is a well-worn staple of the horror genre, but this one plays slightly differently than the usual fare. It is true that Dagmar Overbye was found guilty of murdering babies she took from desperate people, supposedly for adoption. Karoline’s story is transplanted into the framework of this real crime, and allows for an incredibly honest and heart-wrenching look at issues faced by women in underprivileged situations. Concepts like shame, suitability for motherhood, and even original sin in the babies themselves are mulled over. In the finale, Dagmar is on the stand, surrounded by women whose babies she murdered, and insists that her actions amounted to a public service. “These children caused their mothers a lot of suffering, and I helped them!” she tells the judge. She refers to the babies as “shameful infants”, suggesting that to her, the very nature of a child is parasitic and indecent, and that the curse of womankind is the duty to have their lives ruined by children and the expectations they bring.

This brave and not uncontroversial stance on motherhood is muddied by the presence of a little girl, Erena. Purported to be Dagmar’s daughter but eventually revealed not to be, the child is always lurking in the background of her matriarch’s dysfunction and deceit. She is foisted onto Karoline to nurse despite being seven or eight years old, and when she is later told she is too old to be nursed, the child tries to smother a baby Karoline is caring for because it is taking affection away from her. She, too, sees babies as these attention-absorbing entities that rob her of the love she deserves. Her mother’s proclivity for murdering infants is something she observes casually, and her inclusion in the situation calls Dagmar’s morality into question. If children are such a curse, why does she choose to have this one in her life, and what kind of woman is she hoping Elena will become on account of it all?

The Girl with the Needle is a terrifying story of womanhood that needn’t involve itself with the supernatural or your traditional serial killer to convey horror. Yes, it is the story of a serial killer, but more pointedly, it is about the effect of the serial killer on the women around her, and exactly what it is she is symbolically and emotionally taking from people by committing these murders. It calls to mind the likes of Vera Drake, 10 Rillington Place, Eraserhead, and even Freaks. It’s a slice-of-life approach to discomfort that feels that much more impactful because of its familiar domestic setting. It’s about inequality, the gulf between the privileged and the underprivileged, the impacts of war on neutral nations, the characteristics that make a person unfit for public consumption, and most of all, it is about women who have been let down by everyone around them.

The Girl with the Needle comes to theaters on December 6.

Your changes have been saved The Girl With The Needle The Girl with the Needle is a provocative and unflinching look at women’s reproductive rights, and a world that doesn’t give them.ProsFantastic cinematography inspired by German ExpressionismRaw, unflinching performances from Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine DyrholmAn atmospheric score evokes the feeling of silent cinema ConsDeeply unsettling themes of child murder and abortion.

Your changes have been saved The Girl With The Needle, directed by Magnus von Horn, follows Karoline, a young factory worker in post-WWI Copenhagen, as she navigates abandonment and pregnancy. She encounters Dagmar, who operates a clandestine adoption agency within a candy store, offering aid to impoverished mothers seeking foster homes for their children.Release Date May 15, 2024 Director Magnus von Horn Cast Vic Carmen Sonne , Trine Dyrholm , Besir Zeciri , Ava Knox Martin , Joachim Fjelstrup , Tessa Hoder , Ari Alexander , Søren Sætter-Lassen Runtime 115 Minutes

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