THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE (Melbourne IFF 2024) – Review by Nadine Whitney
Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle emerges from the screen like a nightmare. Faces blur in Michał Dymek’s surreal black and white cinematography. They are like silent screams from an expressionist horror film. Set in Copenhagen beginning at the tail end of WWI, the film charts the crushing descent into hopelessness of Karoline Nielsen (Vic Carmen Sonne), a woman who like so many, fought for some safety in the face of an uncaring and cruel society, only to find herself on the dangerous fringes.
Karoline works at a textiles factory as a machinist. She has just been evicted from her apartment for failure to pay rent. Her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) is missing but not declared dead so she cannot collect a widow’s dispensation. She meets with the manager of the factory, Jørgen Kitzler (Joachim Fjelstrup) who is sympathetic to her plight and taken with her delicate beauty. Soon they begin an affair which signals to Karoline an escape from her desperate circumstances and a chance to be in the arms of a gentle man who claims he adores her.
Peter returns from the war. His face grotesquely scarred. He finds Karoline in her dank new lodgings and expects them to resume their marriage. Karoline boils over in anger. For over a year she sought him out, writing letters he would not answer. In an act of cruelty, but also survival, she tells him she has moved on and throws him out on to the street to find his own way in a city which will reject him as a grotesque reminder of a war they are now trying to forget.
Karoline’s dreams of a better life with her rich paramour are scuppered when Jørgen’s mother gets involved. Pregnant and of a class too low for the Kitlzer family to consider, Karoline is rejected by the cowardly Jørgen and fired from her job. She ends up in a bathhouse trying to self-administer a termination with a knitting needle which puts her in the orbit of the seemingly kind baby broker Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) and her young daughter, Erena (Avo Knox Martin).
The Girl with the Needle is based on a notorious true crime case in Denmark. von Horn and co-screenwriter Line Langebek use the horrors of the murders to reveal the greater social horrors that lead the disenfranchised to believe that they can give their unwanted (or unable to be cared for) babies a better life in a city already filled with widows, broken men, women, and children. Karoline, Peter, and even Dagmar are representative of those who keep sliding further and further as grist in system where innocence and guilt are only moral absolutes when viewed from the outside.
That is not to forgive the truly reprehensible acts committed in The Girl with the Needle, but von Horn asks the audience to consider how “evil” is multifaceted. A crowd desiring to gawk at the broken face of a man who served his country in a carnival of freaks is not so different to a crowd wanting to put a face to the ills of Danish society without considering how such a ‘service’ became necessary.
Reminiscent of the works of Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and Carl Theodor Dreyer – with the social realism of Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell; The Girl with the Needle is stunning, bleak, heartbreaking, and strange. A harrowing journey into the past and the social conditions which crush kindness and love. Yet, Magnus von Horn doesn’t want to end the piece on hopelessness. Karoline despite all she has lost; a child, her sanity, her dignity, finds a way to heal by seeing that there is community beyond the small minded.
The Girl with the Needle is an uncompromising vision of broken things and damaged people filtered through an ether haze. Difficult to watch but always gripping. A bold and brilliant piece of cinema.
