THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE (TIFF 2024) – Review by Liz Braun
Beautiful to look at and harrowing to watch, The Girl With The Needle is a drama set in Post WWI Denmark. Anchored on a true crime story of the era in Copenhagen, the film focuses on the lives of marginalized women in that city.
The movie opens with a strange collage of faces, twisted and distorted in anguish, while haunting music heightens a sense of impending doom. With the help of Frederikke Hoffmeier’s distressing music and Michal Dymek’s mesmerizing cinematography, director Magnus von Horn ladles on anxiety from the jump.
Vic Carmen Sonne stars as Karoline, a seamstress working in a sweatshop and living in poverty. Karoline’s husband is presumed dead in the war, and when we meet her she is being evicted from the grubby room where she lives.
She appeals for financial aid from the director of the linen factory where she works; the director (Joachim Fjelstrup) fancies her and they begin an affair. For a brief period she feels protected and loved. Then, shockingly, Karoline’s husband returns, badly wounded from the war.
As events unfold, she winds up pregnant and abandoned; Karoline then crosses paths with the compassionate Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm). Dagmar runs an illegal adoption agency, finding homes for the unwanted babies brought to her little shop in town. Dagmar and her daughter take Karoline into their strange family unit, ostensibly a safe place at last.
Things just get worse.
The Girl With The Needle is in black and white and plays out against a bleaker-than-bleak urban landscape that’s as psychologically draining as it is physically ugly. Von Horn and co-writer Line Langebek Knudsen have captured here the precarious place in the world occupied by women; that the story is set 100 years ago offers nothing in the way of arm’s-length relief and in fact only underlines how very little has changed.
In case you miss the point, Karoline’s badly disfigured husband — no longer useful or decorative — mirrors the proceedings when he is reduced to being a sideshow freak in the circus; polite society can forever shrink from him, point in horror and mock his plight.
The Girl With The Needle is technically superb, thematically despair-inducing and overall utterly engaging. File those seeming contradictions under “magic of cinema”.
