The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.
The story follows Karoline, a seamstress who works in a factory that makes uniforms for the military. It's 1918, and The Great War is grinding to an end. Karoline is in desperate straights. When the movie opens, she is being evicted from her apartment because her landlord wants to show it to a new tenant. Karoline tries to sabotage the sale and almost manages it, but soon she has to take up lodgings in much shabbier conditions where she has to pee into a bucket and where water leaks from the roof into a pool in the middle of the room. She's at rock bottom. Her husband has been missing for a year. She presumes he's dead. When she applies for widow's benefits from her employer, she is told that she must produce a death certificate. Her boss is kindly, though, and attracted to her. They have an affair and she becomes pregnant. Her boss offers to marry her, but his mother will have no such things. She loses her position. Her husband reappears. He has been horribly wounded in the war and is facially disfigured. He disgusts Karoline, who feels betrayed by his year-long silence. She drives him away and then attempts to abort her baby with a knitting needle. She is stopped in the act by Dagmar, a woman at the public bath who is on to what she's doing. When Karoline ultimately has her baby, she takes it to Dagmar, who runs a service that places unwanted infants with families. Or so she says. Karoline strikes up a friendship with Dagmar, but something seems off from the get go. Dagmar's daughter, Erena, seems too young to have a mother Dagmar's age. Dagmar's lover appears to want "fun" from Karoline. And where exactly does Dagmar take the babies in her charge? Karoline, to her sorrow, finds out...
There are commercial reasons why horror finds itself seeping into other areas of cinema. This is especially true in films intended for the arthouse rather than the multiplex. Horror is cheap and commercially reliable, a combination that lets studio empires rise on the back of the genre. But there are social reasons for this, too. Horror movies are a thermometer, taking the temperature of the world around them when they appear and the third decade of the 21st Century has so far been every bit the shit show that the third decade of the previous century was. Horror movies thrive in such times. The Girl With the Needle was made in Denmark, a country that allegedly has its shit together, but it plays like it is a cautionary tale intended for the United States, and other places in the world where misogyny is fanning the flames of authoritarianism. This is very much a film about reproductive rights, given the centrality of abortion in its narrative. The needle of the title is not just the needle of its heroine's trade, it's the instrument of her attempt to terminate her pregnancy. Her circumstances are too desperate for her to bring a child into the world. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the woman who saves her from this is a serial killer of babies who will ultimately finish the job that Karoline starts. This is a film that plays a bit with the Polanski-ish idea of a murderer next door. Late in the movie, even after she realizes what Dagmar does with the babies she takes in, Karoline continues to live with her. She has nowhere else to go, but there's the escalating dread that Dagmar might do her in. Perhaps that soup is poisoned. Maybe it's the tea. The film also suggests an inheritance of violence in Dagmar's daughter, Erena, who has apparently learned her mother's callousness toward infants. This is a narrative thread that tempers the film's final scene.
There is a strong parallel between Jørgen's mother and Karoline herself in the way they both reject people they think are unworthy. Jørgen's mother regards Karoline as entirely unsuitable to wed her son, while Karoline finds Peter's disfigurement a deal-breaker for accepting him back into their marriage. Indeed, Peter winds up working in a freak show, where Karoline has to reckon with his humanity. Can she bring herself to touch him? To kiss him? She sees her husband as a monster, but fails to see the monster with whom she has thrown her lot. Dagmar is the "normal" face of monstrosity, the appalling banality of evil. It's worth noting that the film is based in part on the case of Dagmar Overby, who was convicted in 1920 of murdering 9 babies and remains the most prolific serial killer in Danish history. The nine victims were the ones the prosecutors could prove. She was suspected of many others. One of her favored methods of murdering her charges was to put them into an oven, casting her as a fairy tale witch or as a proto Nazi mass murderer. The film layers a lot of meanings onto her character. The elements of the actual case are only some of them.
Director Magnus van Horn processes this through the earliest roots of the horror film and of cinema itself. He places key scenes in a traveling circus; Tod Browning would have recognized the liminal space of the circus as a place where monstrosity is entirely negotiable. Other parts of the film seem like the industrial age nightmare one sees in The Elephant man, filmed in the same stark black and white. Some of its depiction of early-20th Century Copenhagen have a digital unreality that maps with the otherwheres of silent films that were created on-set. One shot of the rooftops of the city reminds me a bit of the rooftops in Svengali (1931) while others shots of the city seem more modern. Still other scenes go back even further. There's a shot of workers leaving their place of business that's cribbed from one of the Lumiere brothers' films from the 1890s. The end result of the way the visual space of the movie is composed is a melange of silent melodrama and industrial Gothic. It's a film that looks oppressive, in which no one but the very rich (Jørgen and his family) can live comfortably. Van Horn has cramped the screen, too, with a fairly narrow 1.5:1 aspect ratio, barely wider than the old Academy ratio.
I say that this is all relentlessly grim, but that's not entirely true. The opening scene is dire enough, but the way Karoline tries to dissuade the new renter's child by insinuating that rats will come to eat her has an air of fun to it. There is certainly joy and sexual pleasure in Karoline and Jørgen's brief affair, even though an invested viewer will know that it is doomed from the start, and not just because of the class difference involved. We know that Karoline's husband will return. It's not a shock when he does. Peter's place at the circus also grants the film moments of grace, both when Karoline explores his face on stage, and later when she flees Dagmar's arrest and finds Peter at the circus. There's kindness and love there in spite of Karoline's desire to drink lamp oil and end things.
This is a different kind of serial killer film than what a wide audience will be used to. This isn't a procedural and its serial killer isn't some kind of evil genius who taunts the hero. This film's murderer is another desperate woman whose precarity has driven her mad. She claims to be doing what society at large refuses to do in snuffing out young lives before they can join the parade of misery. There's an ideology there, and may be a reaction to a broader ideology that would consume the world a generation later. As I've said, it's a hard film to endure, but its scenes are indelible and its grace notes are unexpected when they come. My favorite of these is the sardonic smile that flashes across Erena's face whens he sees the woman who has come to adopt her. Maybe there's a future for them both.
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