“You’ve done the right thing,” Dagmar Overbye reassures the desperate mothers who hand over their newborns to her for a not insignificant fee. She places a hand on their shoulder, smiles warmly and reassures them that their child will be fostered by doctors or lawyers.
“Good people,” she adds. Her own daughter, well dressed with bouncing blonde curls, serves as small comfort to these new parents. Of course, their child will be taken care of. Dagmar is a mother herself.
Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With The Needle takes us to early twentieth century Denmark, just after the end of World War One, to explore the life of the aforementioned Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm, Birthday Girl), one of the country’s most notorious serial killers.
Dagmar doesn’t quite take centre stage, here. Instead, we are brought into her world via Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne, Holiday). Her soldier husband has not come home, almost a year after the war’s end. Her boss at the factory (Joachim Fjelstrup, All and Eva) embarks on a love affair with her, having initially taken pity on her financial situation. He, too, abandons her, leaving her pregnant and destitute. It is in this desperate situation that several tragic paths converge within her life, leaving Karoline a victim of circumstance and of others.
Frederikke Hoffmeier’s score oscillates between a frenzied ticking, a low eerie grumble and something reminiscent of an air raid siren. It’s used sparingly, and to great effect. Shot in striking, melodramatic black and white, The Girl With The Needle seems to take influence from a number of films. There’s the beautiful shadow-work and soul-seeking close ups of early German Expressionism; an attempted abortion akin to Audrey Diwan’s L’Événement; an elderly mother-figure villain who could have easily stepped out of Hitchcock’s Psycho, so similar is her silhouette. The monochromatic palette is more than just a stylistic choice, too. It serves to underline the drudgery of life in Denmark for the working classes at the time.
Because whilst this might seem an open and shut case of Dagmar is the villain and everyone else is a victim, von Horn does not let it play out that way. Instead, what we get is a critical exploration of poverty and of gender politics; how trauma and desperation leads to bleak choices; how, for many working women, choice feels like a fairytale concept. Karoline and Dagmar are painted entirely in shades of grey.
And it’s these layers of nuance that both Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm bring to their roles. What permeates the screen is Dagmar’s loneliness. She has a boyfriend when it suits him; she talks about her multiple stillbirths; she begs Karoline to stay several times. She weeps as she wakes up. Yes, she is a monster, but Dyrholm does not go for the histrionics. She creates a woman who is layered and complicated and pathetic, despite her wickedness. Vic Carmen Sonne spends most of this film looking utterly dead behind the eyes; life has got her to a point where every day feels like an endlessly bleak attempt at survival. It’s a stunning and emotive lead performance that will undoubtedly elicit your sympathy.
There are lots of lovely little “book end moments” within the film that are made to be noticed. When Karoline’s husband does return, he is so disfigured and traumatised by war that his only option is to join a travelling circus. He is jeered at, nightly, by braying middle-class crowds. It is deeply uncomfortable.
Dagmar’s trial, too, is its own kind of circus with the frightfully modest ladies of the same class heckling their chosen villainess. Karoline’s apartment is a leaking, sawdust ridden mess with grime-slicked windows that barely let in the daylight. Her clothes are stained and sweaty. The more well-to-do parts of town boast clean pavements, elaborate architecture and men and women in hats and frills. Even the screen seems brighter in that end of town. The framing within the film lends itself to some truly gorgeous visuals, with Karoline often in the centre of the screen, bracketed by buildings or pavements. There’s a particularly telling scene with Karoline and her boss / lover, as they quite literally walk on opposite sides of the track to leave the factory. This is not a sensationalist true crime story – this is a film about class.
The Girl With The Needle has the potential to win an Oscar and was, rightfully, lauded at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s not hard to see why. There are brave, vulnerable performances and plenty of unsubtle allusions to poverty and how, in particular, it impacts women. It’s a film that leaves you feeling sad for just about every character. There’s an all encompassing desperation that permeates the entire run time; everyone is just trying to survive in their own way.
Magnus von Horn vividly paints life in early twentieth century Denmark. There are moments that may disturb but, really, this is more about the trauma of poverty. There’s a daily grind, here, that is thick with a filth that can never truly be scrubbed off. It just builds and builds until you are buried by it.
The Girl With The Needle is out in UK cinemas as of January 10 and will appear on MUBI UK from January 24.