Last Updated on December 4, 2024 by Stephinie Heitman
The Girl with the Needle is a 2024 Drama Movie directed by Magnus Van Horn and written by Line Langebek Knudsen, and Magnus von Horn. The film stars Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, and Besir Zeciri with a runtime of 2 hours and 3 minutes, and will be U.S. Release: December 6, 2024, U.K. & Ireland Release: January 10, 2025.
Before watching The Girl with the Needle I remember that somewhere I read that this movie is based on a true story but I do not remember it now. This is because, unlike all the times where the ‘Based on true events’ ending card winds me up with a sense of hope, this left me feeling drenched in sorrow. If you do not want to spoil your day, do not search for it … Instead, please do not watch this movie. But actually, I do because this is an immaculately crafted movie with remarkable performances, a tender melancholy that creeps up on you and takes you by your throat with its subtlety, and a theme as fresh as da aisy even today.
What is The Girl with the Needle All About
In The Girl with the Needle, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is portrayed as a factory worker in Copenhagen after World War I, pregnant, jobless, poor, and alone, she decides to become a wet nurse for unwilling mothers who give out their children for adoption for a fee in an agency run by another woman, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who takes the children from the mothers and finds new families for them.
We are introduced to Karoline, the protagonist, played by Vic Carmen Sonne, mid-eviction scene in her apartment. The Danish seamstress has seemingly slipped from the life she once knew since her husband’s mysterious disappearance to join the army to fight in the ongoing war of World War I despite Denmark’s status as a neutral country. Unnamed and unrecognized among the faceless victims of war, the uncertain fate of this unknown man oppresses Karoline as an unburdened chain that does not let her collect welfare for widows.
She has to watch powerlessly as her landlord brings in another young woman, marginally better off, accompanied by a child, and tries to dissuade them from taking the tiny room of hers — threatening to tell the child horrible things she supposes they have to face in the dark: rats and hunger.
Whimpering, the child says she doesn’t want to live in the apartment … at which point, her mother rears back and slaps her across the face, drawing blood. “It will do,” says the mother, accepting the apartment as Karoline’s face processes the small role she just played in inflicting a little pain on a child.
This is the cold socio-realism of director Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, a visually stunning film about the indifference of the world and its viciousness that spares no one, not even for the sake of punctilious gender roles. Though it is hard to place into a category, it is psychological horror on the border of traumatic biography and it is based on the true story of 1910s Denmark of horribly mutilated newborns. These horrors are seen from the perspective of a protagonist, Karoline, seen as both a victim and perpetrator, a woman whose plausible deniability takes place in the realm of the very things that one can choose not to comprehend due to the nature of society. Sometimes, this is less difficult than discovering the evils of the truth that we may be lurking.
This is not to downplay that Karoline did suffer, but the kind of suffering she went through is of the usual variety for her class of society. As a working poor, she spends her days and nights sewing war uniforms in the textile factory but she still considers herself lucky to be employed somewhere instead of doing piecemeal jobs that are exhausting and backbreaking, which are the only other ways of making a living.
Being pregnant from her boss, the attractive factory owner, Karoline finds a lone ray of hope at the end of the black tunnel – the cowardly man is planning to marry her to provide for the child; however, his arrogant family annihilates this future, stating they will cut him off from the family inheritance if he continues to see Karoline. She’s thrown out in a disgusting and visibly pregnant manner in one of the many heartbreaks offered by the movie and now she is thinking of the savage and potentially fatal action of inflicting a clumsy abortion on herself in a public bathhouse.
The only way for her to be spared at that moment is through the arrival of the benevolent Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) who convinces her to keep the baby, for she will be adopted by a reputable family rather than aborted.
Of course, this is the kind of lie that is told to Karoline and hence she becomes the woman’s assistant, or better still, a wet nurse for her baby. Families dump newborn babies to the older woman, who runs a candy store only for a front, Dagmar for child-minding services, these young women and their children supposedly go to new families which we never colors of seeing, allegedly charitable, hospitable, and very kind individuals and this is how it ends.
The terrible truth is out there, hiding just around the corner for our main character to stumble upon. Finally, when Dagmar is forced to face reality and put up a confrontation, she doesn’t even bother to come up with a specific reason or excuse for her actions, other than “The world is a horrible place.” These children were unwanted. Standing against a crowd in the film’s conclusion, she attempts to turn the blame back on them like serial killer Hans Beckert at the end of Fritz Lang’s M: “That’s what was needed. ”I only did what you’re too scared to do.”
All in all, it is quite a cold approach toward the concept, yet one can hardly turn a blind eye to such an opinion nowadays. The Girl with the Needle targets the square upon the suffering, the undertaking, and the often unwanted and uninvited load that is often associated with being a mother. Based on the plot, a woman like Karoline did not get pregnant on purpose, and she, by all means, does not have the necessary support in the person of a father or family, or from the state, which is considered a basic need and a right in the raising of a child. In von Horn’s film, men are completely erased from the picture, and relegated to the position of merely being the initiator of conception.
Pregnancy is espoused as a woman’s responsibility; a sacred duty to safeguard that which cannot even safeguard itself. The weight of that responsibility powers willingness to believe the collective lie: That you can lay your burden down with no sin attached to it. For women, Dagmar can be seen as an opportunity to say to themselves that they have run away from this burden and did not become soulless in the process, while in The Girl with the Needle, the authors make it quite clear from the very beginning that there is no such escape possible. They are all barbarians here, always preying on the vulnerable members of the society, whether it is the male creature or the female creature.
This kind of nihilism and cinematic misanthropy would perhaps unsurprisingly threaten to make the film oppressive to watch beyond even the degree to which this is intended, but that is where the incredibly beautiful filmmaking of The Girl with the Needle raises it beyond the mere horrors of its depictions. Its visuals are stunning: Having the storyline shot in black and white adds to its dramatic intensity and creates a somewhat fairy-tale-like ambiance of Gothic horror in the rather gloomy and dark streets of Copenhagen.
In these backyards, the sandy paths are always wet and housing these disgusting, still waters; the dripping rooms with rotten walls inhabited by mold await the poor souls who are capable of paying a few cents more for a roof from the ground instead of the bare ground which is a mixed blessing between the haves and have-nots. The active camera of the director of photography Michał Dymek steals through the streets like a pickpocket urchin and can create even a feeling of richly romantic at times, for example, a sequence indicating Karoline and the factory owner through the street and ogling at each other.
This brief moment of beauty is then immediately followed by a nasty abrupt cut back to the couple now frantically copulating in a muddy back alley while pedestrians nonchalantly walk by 30 feet away completely oblivious to the unpleasant scenario. Unusually, there is editing that makes one feel that one should shower to wash the off seasoned feeling that comes with watching it.
Rest assured: The Girl with the Needle can be considered an unconventional entry in the category of horror films, but it is a horror in the truest and, in a certain way, most tangible form. It evokes nausea each time in the layered, grimy aesthetics of the world created; the destitution of the population; or the literal and figurative carnage left behind by the insatiable characters. When Karoline’s seemingly lost husband reappears, she doesn’t recognize him: He has a human face mask with grimaces in front of his face because he has lost significant portions of his face while participating in front-line fighting.
The unpleasant feeling of not knowing what is awaiting a person under that mask is indescribable – one can hear the rheumy rumbling sounds of a covered face, and the clicking noises indicating a chewed jaw, throat, tongue. Which disgust is more understandable: The sensation of disgust that one could associate with Karoline’s reaction to the man, who emerged in her life uninvited, or the viewers’ disgust directed at the protagonist, whose lack of compassion toward the man is nearly absolute?
Regardless of its interpretation, The Girl with the Needle is an unbearably chilling story of historical horror that embodies the bitterness and misanthropic sincerity of its anti-heroine. People are quick to find something wrong in what is said or done and frequently snap at the slightest provocation There is very little tolerance for feeling for one another.
“The world is a horrible place,” asserts Dagmar, and The Girl with the Needle does little to argue otherwise, even as it holds out the barest hope for some kind of peace in the wake of the slaughter. Perhaps, at the very least, the sacrifices will buy us a short respite before the same lessons must be learned all over again.
The Girl with the Needle Parents Guide & Age Rating
The Girl with the Needle is not rated because it has not undergone the official rating process by the Motion Picture Rating (MPA).
