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| Images courtesy of MUBI |
The world is a horrible place, but we need to believe it’s not so.
The Girl with the Needle (2024) establishes a world where everyone is so preoccupied with their own survival that they do not have an ounce of spare empathy for anyone else. It takes place in Denmark at the tail end of WWI and follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) a young woman who is barely making ends meet due to her husband going missing during the war. Life after war is hard enough, but in the early 1920s it’s even more difficult is one is a woman. Karoline’s options are limited because she doesn’t have a man to navigate society for her and women had few rights and resources.
The film itself is structured like a dark fairy tale, and the universe that Karoline has to navigate is dreary and hopeless. She works at a garment factory and eventually catches the roving eye of Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) the wealthy owner of the business. After a sweaty and passionate affair, she ends up pregnant, but thanks to Jørgen's overbearing mother, she is cast away from the family and fired from her job. Again, her station as a woman has essentially made her expendable, and she is tossed aside while carrying a child like a piece of trash.
Karoline’s desperate life full of woe isn’t an uncommon trope in fairy tales, in stories such as Cinderella and Snow White the protagonist usually goes through much suffering before being vindicated at the end of the narrative. At Karoline’s lowest point, what appears to be her “fairy godmother” appears in the form of Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) a charming older woman who says that she owns an adoption agency. She offers to take Karoline’s child after it is born and give it a good home with a wealthy family—for a fee, of course.
For those who know the real-life story this film is based on, Dagmar's true intentions will be clear, but the way her character is introduced and portrayed sets up a slow burn character arc. She older and wiser, and at times cynical and pragmatic, having dealt with her own set of tragedies. At the peripheral is Dagmar's ward Erena (Avo Knox Martin) a young girl with an extreme co-dependency on her mother. In this way these three characters represent the different time periods of a woman's life: innocent youth, troubled young adult, and disaffected older age.
Visually, the sumptuous black-and-white color grading and inky shadows give the aesthetic an otherworldly feel, and occasionally the characters will sink in and out of the shadows, the only thing visible the tiny reflections in their eyes. The standout is Frederikke Hoffmeier's horror film adjacent score that resonates with ominous tones contrasted with a lyrical and glassy melody that rings over the saddest moments.
The Girl with the Needle is an attempt to understand what kind of environment would facilitate heinous acts of cruelty and what would make an individual see those acts as the ultimate kindness. A society where people can slip through the cracks unnoticed, or even if they are noticed be ignored. It's an exploration of how easy it is to slip into the mantle of madness if it is presented with a smile and hug it tightly to your chest as if you never want to let it go.
--Michelle Kisner