Director: Magnus von Horn Starring: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri Running Time: 115 minutes
While Robert Eggers’ take on Nosferatu has become a box-office hit, with viewers ravenous for a gothic account of sexual politics not seen since My Immortal, the vampire flick doesn’t have a monopoly at the cinema this month for that kind of story. Its rival admittedly does have a much harder sell, a horror not rooted in the sensational or supernatural, but in the cold, miserable reality so often faced by women throughout history.
In life-drained black and white, the visuals of Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle are a carousel of dark iconography: miserably mechanical workhouses, a leering circus freak show, the shocked faces of freshly slapped children, a collection of stark scenes, assembled by von Horn and cinematographer Mihcal Dymek like flashes from a particularly depressing nightmare. The world is a horrible place, but we must act like it isn’t so, according to the philosophy of one of the film’s damned characters, and from the film’s ominous opening, where faces cast in darkness are contorted and distorted, it seems clear that von Horn believes the first part. His characters here are cruel, their fates even more so – this is not a film to fight off the January blues.
In Copenhagen, just as World War One is winding down, seamstress Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is struggling. Evicted and alone, with her husband missing on the front lines, she shacks up with the handsome and kindly boss of the mill where she works, and just as she dares hope that things might be looking up, she finds out she’s pregnant, is dumped and fired, and has to care for her returning husband as he’s both completely traumatised and facially disfigured, wearing a similar mask to Boardwalk Empire’s Richard Harrow. Adrift between the meek mill man who can look after her but won’t, and the injured and impotent husband who wants to look after her even though she doesn’t, we see how Karoline’s choices are constricted by hyper-rigid sexual and social power dynamics. Though it seems sometimes that the story of the film drags its lead unnaturally in the most dismal directions possible, underneath it all it tracks; Karoline is desperate for a way out which leads her to the most desperate ways out.
She seeks out Dagmar, played with an intriguingly inconsistent matriarchal touch by Trine Dyrholm. Behind her sweet shop front (literally a sweet exterior), Dagmar runs an underground adoption agency for unwanted children. Karoline first uses Dagmar’s services, then works with her, and the first act’s despairing love triangle turns out only to be a setup for the film’s more prioritised relationship, as the pair of women grow co-dependently closer. Their darkly complex bond and its twists and turns serve as a stand-in for wider questions about female bodily autonomy, the expectations of child rearing, and the dehumanising nature of having choices stripped away. Even if the film sometimes finds itself meandering in misery, there is a method behind it.
As in von Horn’s previous film, social media thriller Sweat, there is more empathy for the film’s subjects here then there seems at first glance, which builds to an admirably ambitious ending, and allows for some cracks of catharsis during what is otherwise a bleak affair. For many The Girl with the Needle will be too prickly, but its relevant messaging, like those distorted faces in its intro, are hard to look away from even when they’re hard to look at.
(3 / 5)
The Girl with the Needle screens in Irish cinemas from January 10th, 2025.