“Black and white” here only refers to the image design, not to the cinematic depiction of moral questions.
Photo: Mubi
Karoline is pregnant, the child’s father-to-be is the owner of the textile factory where she works and produces uniforms for the Danish troops in the First World War. Her husband is considered missing, Karoline later finds out that his face was blown off – he comes back as a monstrosity, she throws him out because she has something better now, the factory owner. But his mother restores class relations on a small scale; of course the proletarian Karoline will not move into her factory owner’s villa, and her son will not have to raise a proletarian child.
The long exposition is bad enough, but the hell in black and white that is Magnus von Horn’s film “The Girl with the Needle” picks up speed again at this point, without varying the leisurely, oppressive pace of the narrative and stacks up the atrocities are towering. Karoline’s ex-husband becomes a circus freak and she tries to have an abortion with a needle in the bathhouse. Karoline is found by Dagmar, unconscious from pain. Dagmar says she would illegally place unwanted children with rich families. Karoline gets her child and brings it to Dagmar. And after being placed away, he moves in with her to support the business.
Things are visibly going downhill: morphine addiction, breakdowns, suffocated, then burned babies – “The Girl with the Needle” doesn’t actually show anything that you can hold on to as a viewer. The misery is all-encompassing.
Nevertheless, von Horn’s film departs from the tradition of Danish depression cinema, which was essentially played by Lars von Trier. And that’s because he’s not interested – not primarily and not secondarily – in beating up his audience with his pictures. But because he embeds the violence and misery in a view of the social sphere in which they arise and take place. A film that shows what society is. Or better yet, what it means to have to live as an unwanted woman in a patriarchal social system.
“The Girl with the Needle” succeeds in showing the truly cruel emotions and actions of its female characters in a way that makes them appear not excusable, but consistent.
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“Black and white” here only refers to the image design, not to the filmic design of moral and all other questions: “The Girl with the Needle” succeeds in showing the truly cruel emotions and actions of its female characters in a way that which makes this seem inexcusable, but logical. And that doesn’t mean the prenatal abortion that Karoline carries out, but the postnatal crime. The script closely follows the case of Copenhagen serial killer Dagmar Overby, who was convicted in 1921 of murdering at least 16 infants and small children whom she burned and drowned. The children’s ashes were scattered throughout their apartment.
In the trial in the film, the murderer speaks very clearly about the world in which she murdered. The violence is all-round. In this sense, the case is in line with the cases of other murderous women in emerging times, for example that of the Bremen poisoner Gesche Gottfried. And here, as in the most recent reconstructions of the Gottfried case, the images make a shift – away from the psychology of the perpetrator and towards a dissection of the environment in which this could all happen. Or had to.
“The Girl with the Needle” doesn’t put anything into perspective. The child murders are filmed with a devastating, sober cruelty that makes it difficult to bear while watching. But a sense of causality and inevitability is conveyed, and in this sense “The Girl with the Needle” is enlightening in the best sense of the word.
“The Girl with the Needle”, Denmark/Poland/Sweden 2024. Director: Magnus von Horn, book: Line Langebek Knudsen, Magnus von Horn. With: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Tessa Hoder. 115 min. Now in the cinema.