Right back to the early days of cinema, Scandinavian male film-makers have always taken great relish in tormenting their heroines with extreme mental and physical punishment. Sure enough, the cruel hammer blows of a pitiless universe rain down hard on the young female protagonist in Swedish writer-director Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle. Shot in lustrous monochrome, this eye-catching exercise in historical Nordic Noir takes place in a bleakly beautiful Copenhagen around the end of World War 1, an urban hellscape populated by desperately poor underclass workers, hideously wounded military veterans, sexual predators and vulnerable young women seeking illegal abortions. The stage is set for exploitation, deception and murder. The theme of women fighting for agency over their bodies also gives this century-old story a biting contemporay relevance, which is no accident.
The Girl with the Needle is loosely based on real events, though von Horn saves this admission for the end credits, possibly to avoid tipping off Danish viewers already familiar with the details. Or maybe just to help the director create a self-contained, fable-like story that he likens to “a fairytale for grown-ups” with its lovesick monsters, weak-willed princes, wicked witches and damsels in distress. “I wanted to explore if it is possible to be good in hell,” von Horn explains in his press notes for Cannes, where the film screens in competition this week.
Von Horn has a strong track record in Cannes. Both his previous previous features, the post-traumatic crime drama After Life (2016) and Sweat (2020), an intimate portrait of an online fitness influencer, were selected for Croisette premieres, although the latter fell victim to pandemic cancellation. A handsome blend of eye-catching visuals, gripping suspense and solid Nordic acting talent, notably Danish screen queen Trine Dyrholm, The Girl With the Needle is his most ambitious production to date, with a genre-friendly crime-thriller plot that should ensure wider audience appeal beyond festival and art-house circles.
Von Horn and his regular Polish cinematographer Michal Dymek establish the film’s striking high-art look early, opening with a wordless panorama of anguished faces projected onto uneven surfaces. With echoes of Jonathan Glazer, this lightly experimental sequence conjurs a mood of eerie, hallucinatory, nightmarish otherness. Sublime black-and-white photography and meticulous production design then combine to create richly atmospheric tableaux of cobbled streets, steamy bath houses, gaslit interiors, shadowy alleyways, plunging stairwells, and sharp-angled tenement buildings. With Poland standing in for early 20th century Denmark, the defining aesthetic here is gothic melodrama with heavy overtones of German Expressionism. Even in its darkest moments, The Girl with the Needle delivers ravishing, deliciously dark visuals.
Vic Carmen Sonne (Godland) gives an intense, magnetic performance as Karoline, a young factory worker struggling to afford her squalid rented rooms in a gloomy, purgatorial Copenhagen. Paternalistic offers of help from upper-class factory owner Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) turn into a sexual affair, pregnancy and hesitant marriage plans, but Jørgen’s coldly imperious mother soon shatters any romantic future hopes. Meanwhile Karoline’s soldier husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), missing in action and long presumed dead, suddenly resurfaces with hideous facial injuries that he keeps hidden behind a mask. Scarred inside and out, he can only find humiliating employment as a circus freak, a sequence that recalls David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). The pair attempt a reconciliation, but both prove too damaged. Karoline soon finds herself alone again, unemployed and heavily pregnant.
Following a failed, grim attempt to terminate her own pregnancy, Karoline gives birth to a child she cannot afford to keep. In desperation, she turns to Dagmar (Dyrholm on majestic form), who runs an illegal business arranging for wealthy childless couples to adopt the newborn babies of young, poor, ill-prepared mothers. A hard-nosed businesswoman, Dagmar charges for her services, but since Karina is penniless, she offers to work off her debt instead. Hired as a wet nurse for newly arrived infants, Karoline moves into the apartment that Dagmar shares with her young daughter Erena (Avo Knox Martin), perched above a sweet shop. Only here does she start to suspect Dagmar’s aura of kindly matriarchal concern is not what it seems.
It is hard to convey the full horror of the film’s final act without risking serious plot spoilers. Suffice to say The Girl With the Needle is loosely based on a notorious serial murder case in 1920s Denmark, a lingering national trauma which has already inspired novels and stage plays. But even if we anticipate these chilling revelations, von Horn still delivers a powerful retro-noir thriller, its disquieting mood underscored by Oskar Skriver’s discordant, nerve-jangling sound design. Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later. “The world is a horrible place,” Dagmar says, “but we need to believe it isn’t so.” She is talking to Karoline but also, on some level, to all of us.
Director: Magnus von Horn
Screenwriters: Magnus von Horn, Line Langebek
Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Avo Knox Martin, Joachim Fjelstrup, Tessa Hoder
Producers: Malene Blenkov, Mariusz Wlodarski
Cinematography: Michal Dymek
Editing: Agnieszka Glinska
Production designer: Jagna Dobesz
Costume designer: Malgorzata Fudala
Sound designer: Oskar Skriver
Production companies: Nordisk Film Production (Denmark), Lava Films (Poland), EC1 Lodz (Poland), Lower Silesia Film Centre (Poland), Film i Väst (Sweden), Nordisk Film Sweden (Sweden)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In Danish
115 minutes
