The Girl with the Needle Pierces the Horror and Responsibility of Motherhood

As The Girl with the Needle opens, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is in the midst of being evicted from her apartment. The Danish seamstress has seemingly fallen on hard times since the disappearance of her husband, who enlisted to fight in the ongoing conflict of World War I despite the country’s official status of neutrality. Not officially confirmed among the anonymous war dead, the unknown status of this man weighs on her like an invisible anchor, preventing Karoline from being able to collect welfare for widows. She’s forced to stand idly by while her landlord shows her modest apartment to another (slightly more prosperous) young woman with child in tow, Karoline attempting to talk them out of acquiring the place by frightening the child with stories of squalid conditions and hungry rats in the darkness. Whimpering, the child says she doesn’t want to live in the apartment … at which point, her mother rears back and slaps her across the face, drawing blood. “It will do,” says the mother, accepting the apartment as Karoline’s face processes the small role she just played in inflicting a little pain on a child.

Such is the brutal pragmatism of director Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, a gorgeously shot testament to the world’s callousness and cruelty, divorced from the petty construct of gender as it foists unimaginable suffering on the weakest among us. Difficult to classify, but hovering in the conceptual space between psychological horror and traumatic biography, the film is inspired by a real-life series of atrocities committed toward newborn babies in 1910s Denmark. Protagonist Karoline witnesses these horrors as both victim and accomplice, a woman whose dubious claim of ignorance resides in the moral gray area of what we can effectively choose to ignore by claiming to not understand. Sometimes, this is simply easier than uncovering the horrors of the truth we may suspect.

This is not to say that Karoline’s suffering isn’t momentous in its own right, but it’s also suffering of an all-too-common nature for her socioeconomic caste. A member of the working poor, she toils long days and nights at the textile factory making war uniforms, but must simultaneously count herself fortunate to have regular employment rather than trying to rely on the sporadic, backbreaking manual labor that would otherwise be her only other mode of supporting herself. Impregnated by her boss, the charming factory owner, Karoline sees a brief, shining glimpse of comfort at the end of her dark tunnel, before the cowardly man’s aristocratic family dissolves their impending union and casts her out by threatening to cut him off from the family inheritance. She’s kicked to the curb in the first of the film’s many heartbreaking disappointments, a destitute and visibly pregnant woman now mulling over the savage and potentially deadly act of giving herself a clumsy abortion at a public bathhouse. Only the intervention of the kindly Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) saves her life in that moment, while also convincing her to keep the child, to be adopted by a “good family” rather than terminated.

Such is the lie that Karoline allows herself to be told by Dagmar, eventually becoming the woman’s assistant and resident wet nurse. Families bring the older woman (who operates a candy store as a front) newborn babies, paying Dagmar to take the children off their hands, and they then supposedly go off to these “new families,” kindly and generous folks who we never seem to witness in the flesh. The horrible reality is right there, waiting for our protagonist to trip over it. When finally confronted, Dagmar doesn’t even offer any particular rationale or defense, beyond “The world is a horrible place.” These children were unwanted. Standing against a crowd in the film’s conclusion, she attempts to turn blame back on them like serial killer Hans Beckert at the end of Fritz Lang’s M: “That’s what was needed. I only did what you’re too scared to do.”

Suffice to say, it’s a chilling sentiment, but one that is difficult to shy away from. The Girl with the Needle takes square aim at the pain, the burden, the sometimes unwelcome and unasked for responsibility inherent to motherhood. A woman like Karoline certainly didn’t ask to be with child, and she by no means has the kind of support–from a father, from a family, from the state–that we now consider to be not just a necessity but a right in making the raising of a child possible. Men are almost absent entirely from the equation in von Horn’s film, an afterthought beyond their contribution to the spark of conception. Babies are ultimately a woman’s burden; a sacred responsibility to protect that which cannot in any way, shape or form protect itself. The weight of that responsibility powers willingness to believe the collective lie: That you can unburden yourself in a way free from sin. Dagmar offers women a chance to tell themselves that they have escaped their burden without losing their souls in the process, but the brutal setting of The Girl with the Needle makes it clear immediately that no such exit exists. There’s only savagery here, perpetually directed at the weakest members of society by its most cunning monsters, male or female.

This kind of nihilism and cinematic misanthropy would perhaps unsurprisingly threaten to make the film oppressive to watch beyond even the degree to which this is absolutely intended, but that’s where the incredibly beautiful filmmaking of The Girl with the Needle raises it beyond the mere horrors of its depictions. Its visuals are absolutely stunning: Dramatic, high-contrast black and white cinematography captures a mythic, almost fairy tale sense of macabre wonder in the streets of the bleak, shadow-shrouded Copenhagen. In the back alleys, unpaved dirt paths hold pools of disgusting, stagnant water while dripping “apartment” rooms full of mold await residents who can cough up the difference between sleeping outside and with a marginal roof over their heads, a symbolic chasm between the lowest tiers of haves and have-nots. The active camera of cinematographer Michał Dymek cruises the streets like a pickpocket urchin, capable of evoking even a sense of sumptuous romanticism at times, as in the sequence where Karoline and her factory owner boss walk down opposite sides of the street as they flirtatiously gaze on each other. That brief sense of beauty is then expertly dashed with an immediate smash cut to the couple now rutting in a dirty alley while passerby stroll past in the background 30 feet away, ignoring the abjectly disgusting spectacle. Rarely does a piece of editing make you feel like you should immediately go shower away the secondhand filth of watching it.

Rest assured: The Girl with the Needle is an unconventional entry for the horror genre, but every bit a horror film in the truest and most tactile sense of the word. It inspires waves of revulsion at the layered and gritty production design of its world; the selfish barbarism of its characters; the macabre visual remnants of people who have been chewed up and spit out by its cruelty. When Karoline’s seemingly lost husband reappears, she doesn’t recognize him: He’s wearing a disturbing human face mask as a result of having lost large segments of his face on the front lines of combat. The suspense of not knowing what lies under that mask is terrible–we can hear the rheumy rumbling sounds behind it, the clicking noises suggesting a mangled jaw, throat, tongue. Which disgust is more understandable: Karoline’s recoil from the man’s sudden and unwelcome reappearance in her life, or the audience’s toward our protagonist for her almost total lack of empathy toward him?

Regardless of how you approach it, The Girl with the Needle remains an absolutely harrowing piece of historical horror, with an atmosphere of coldness and all-too-real misanthropy that captures a searing sense of truth. Empathy is in short supply, and any time some is offered, we collectively wait for the other shoe to drop and crush us to death in the process. “The world is a horrible place,” asserts Dagmar, and The Girl with the Needle does little to argue otherwise, even as it holds out the barest hope for some kind of peace in the wake of the slaughter. Perhaps, at the very least, the sacrifices will buy us a short respite before the same lessons must be learned all over again.

Director: Magnus von Horn
Writer: Magnus von Horn, Line Langebek
Stars: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri
Release date: Dec. 6, 2024

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.