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The Girl with the Needle.

The Girl with the Needle was Denmark’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the final cut to be among the five nominees even though it presents real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who took payments from desperate women to adopt out their babies, only to murder the infants instead, in a somewhat sympathetic light. It’s dark, strange, and extremely creepy, playing out like a horror film where the main character is never truly in danger herself. (It’s streaming free for Mubi subscribers, or you can rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a garment-factory worker in Denmark during World War I, married to a soldier who she presumes is dead, as there’s been no word from him in a year. She’s evicted from her rooms when the film opens, but when goes to her boss to try to get help obtaining widow’s benefits, he takes advantage of her and she becomes pregnant. Her husband returns from the war, disfigured from battle, and she sends him away because she believes she’s going to marry her boss. He reneges, of course, and she loses her job, after which she tries to perform an abortion on herself with a giant needle while in a public bath, only to have Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) stop her and potentially save her life. Karoline has the baby with Dagmar’s help, at another job the older woman helped her find, and she pays Dagmar to give the baby to another family; when she can’t pay all of what she owes, she goes to work in Dagmar’s candy shop and helps convince other women to give their babies up as well, until she becomes suspicious that Dagmar isn’t what she seems.

The story itself is sort of beside the point; Dagmar is a real person, apparently quite infamous in Denmark as the serial killer with the most known victims in the country’s history, so clearly the film will end somehow with her arrest. Instead, director and co-writer Magnus van Horn focuses on the relationship between the two women, telling the New York Times that he chose to find “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” which is a bold strategy, given what Dagmar was doing. (There’s no direct violence in the film; the only murder that takes place on the screen is hidden from our and Karoline’s view.) That choice means that the film can only succeed or fail on the quality of the script and of the two lead performances.

The two women, both decorated actors in Denmark, deliver strong, compelling performances, particularly Dyrholm, who can be completely terrifying but also capable of surprising, often sudden bouts of empathy. The script depicts her murders as the result of a nihilistic view of the world, where in her mind these babies would go on to lives of suffering, poverty, and abuse, and a belief that she is actually helping the women she’s conning. (I couldn’t find any evidence that the real Dagmar Overbye was like this; her defense at trial was that she was abused as a child as well.) She’s initially cold to Karoline, helping her in some tangible, discrete ways, before eventually taking her in and bonding with the younger woman, as does Dagmar’s young daughter, Erena.

Van Horn lays the atmosphere on a bit thickly, however, and it ends up diminishing the film by going too far. The entire film is shot in black and white, and the streets are filthy – sooty, muddy, diseased, anything you can think of to increase the sense of bleakness and despair. The beginning resembles a misery-porn remix of Fantine’s story in Les Misérables, to a predictable level, until Karoline attempts the abortion, after which the story becomes something new and much more interesting; the first third or so of the movie is nothing you haven’t seen before. It needs Dagmar’s character to at least give us something new, even if it’s shocking; because Dyrholm plays her as someone who appears to exist on both sides of the edge of madness, the moment she arrives in the film the pace picks up, while it also allows us to get away from a story that keeps kicking Karoline in the teeth. Two hours of that would have been unbearable. Once the real plot begins, it’s still dark and unsparing, but a far more intriguing story, and a better watch due to the two strong leads.

(I still haven’t seen the winner of the Best International Film category, the Brazilian film I’m Still Here, but it’s loaded up for my next flight; of the other four, I’d put this second, behind the German submission The Seed of the Sacred Fig.)

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→ February 24, 2025
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The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Shot in secret in 2022-23, The Seed of the Sacred Fig was banned in Iran and its release abroad led to arrest warrants for the director, Mohammad Rasoulof, after which he and most members of the cast fled the country. It’s a nearly three-hour epic film that starts out as a political drama, morphs into a sort of psychological thriller, and ends up as almost an action film, as we follow a single family during the 2022-23 protests against the theocratic regime, unrest that takes this apparently quiet household and shatters its peace and the fragile mind of its patriarch.

Iman was a low-level investigator for the Islamic dictatorship that has ruled Iran since 1979, and as the film begins he’s been promoted to a more senior investigative role, one that will pay better, grant him better housing, and that also gives him a gun, invoking Chekhov’s rule. His family doesn’t know what he does for work at first, but he tells his wife Najmeh, and the two of them then have to explain to their two daughters, Rezvan and Sana, that they must be particularly rigid about following the laws, including wearing the hijab (which was at the root of the protests) and avoiding posting pictures of themselves on social media. Rezvan’s friend ends up injured by the police while the two are leaving a university building, and Najmeh helps patch the friend up briefly while getting her out of the house before Iman knows she’s been there, but this is just the undercard for what’s to come: The gun goes missing, and Iman assumes the culprit is in the house. That shifts the entire tenor of the movie to one that looked outward to the brutal police response to the protestors into one that looks inward at how Iman’s new job, where he is rubber-stamping dozens if not hundreds of executions per day, has warped his inner self and made him into a tyrant who will gladly repress the women under his command at the slightest provocation.

The fact that it was filmed in secret only underscores the movie’s broader themes of how authoritarian regimes destroy the fundamental bonds that hold us together, with family above all: They turn neighbors against neighbors and family members against family members. Iman has no reason to distrust or suspect his compliant wife or his daughters of anything until the government sends him home with a metaphor. He and his wife are both true believers in the regime and in their Islamic faith, while their daughters, who have access to social media and can see that the government is lying to them, want the same kind of freedoms that the protestors are fighting for. The conflict in their home mirrors the conflict in Iranian society, and when Iman goes around the bend and begins terrorizing his family after their address and his picture appear online, he resorts to increasingly harsh and inhumane tactics to force their obedience, with somewhat predictable consequences for everyone. The final moment and image are further loaded with symbolism, as the hollow foundation beneath one character’s feet gives way, arguing just how tenuous the power of a dictatorship truly is.

This is easily one of the best films I’ve seen from 2024, even if it drags a little in the final third, as Rasoulof seems less adept at managing the action sequences than he is at the psychological thiller bits; there’s a long section where several characters are chasing each other through some ruins, but you could easily put the Benny Hill music over it and it would work just fine. The shift from the macro lens to the micro one is just brilliant, as the script sets up the context with real footage from the protests, making especial note of just how much the violence came down against women (in a country that already is one of the most repressive in the world when it comes to women’s rights), before moving to the family drama, where it becomes increasingly clear that these three women are just serfs who exist at the whim of their father. It’s a brutal and unstinting look at Iranian society; no wonder the authoritarian clerics didn’t like it.

(I don’t think this film has a chance at the Best International Feature Film Oscar this year, for which it’s one of the five nominees, as I’m Still Here is also in that category and has a Best Picture nod as well, which probably means it will end up taking the spot everyone assumed would go to Emilia Perez before that film’s implosion in the last few weeks.)

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→ November 20, 2024
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Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez has so much going for it that it seemed like a can’t miss – it’s a musical, it’s a redemption story, it’s about a trans person coming out and finding themselves, it’s a comedy. Unfortunately in trying to be all of those things, it ends up almost nothing at all. It’s an incoherent babblefest, salvaged only a little by its three main performances, notably that of Zoe Saldaña. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer in Mexico who is disgusted by her work as a defense attorney, as she’s helping defend a man who killed his wife by arguing that she killed herself – and she doesn’t even get the ‘glory’ of arguing the case, as she writes the words and her dim-witted boss gives the big speech. She’s then contacted by the cartel boss Las Manitas, who reveals that he wants to come out as a trans woman, including undergoing gender confirmation surgery, and wants Rita to make all of the arrangements – including faking his death so she can begin a new life as Emilia Pérez. (She’s played in both incarnations by Karla Sofia Gascón, a trans actress from Spain.) Las Manitas was married, however, to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two kids, and after transitioning, Emilia decides she can’t live without her children, so she poses as a wealthy cousin of Las Manitas and invites the them and their mother to come live with her, which goes off the rails when Jessi takes up again with her old lover Gustavo. Meanwhile, Emilia decides to make amends for her past by helping relatives of people presumed killed by drug cartels find out their loved ones’ fates, using her money and her connections to the underworld, becoming a popular hero for her efforts and her criticism of the authorities.

That would be enough plot to fill a ten-part TV series, but not only does Emilia Pérez try to pack it all into two hours, it does so in song. There are sixteen songs in the film, some of which are actually quite good (“El Mal,” sung by Saldaña during the gala dinner, is a real standout, and she nails it), although I’m not sure if “Vaginoplasty” ever really needed to see the light of day. The result is that a plot already stretched to translucency ends up so shallow that the film never actually says anything – even though it seems to think it has a lot to say.

The kernel at the heart of the story is fantastic: A drug lord fakes his death, comes out (privately) as transgender, establishes an entire new identity as a woman, and becomes a crusader against the violence of the drug trade and the government’s war on the cartels. That’s all this film needed to be an epic satire of the current state of Mexico, and Gascón would have been up to the task, as she’s perfectly menacing as Las Manitas, then entirely credible as a remorseful Emilia who uses the same determination that made her a successful criminal to become a serious reformer – even though the violent resolve is still there in reserve.

This isn’t that film, starting with the decision to make Rita the main character rather than Emilia, even though Emilia is in the title. Rita’s just nowhere near as interesting as Emilia is, not through any fault of Saldaña’s, but because she’s written so austerely, while Emilia is the one truly three-dimensional character in the film. Her trans status is more of a detail; it makes the plot work, but it’s not a part of why her character is so interesting. Emilia has the emotional depth and range that the other characters lack, and she should have been the central character, but the script has no interest in, say, exploring her emotional growth, or just her change of heart, or perhaps questioning whether she really understands the wrongs she committed. There’s a faint implication that she was just so deeply unhappy that it drove her to bad acts, but that’s pretty facile (if that’s even what writer-director Jacques Audiard intended) and I think could even lean into the whole “queer as mental illness” myth.

Saldaña is as good as she can be with a poorly written character, and when she sings and dances – she’s a trained dancer, which I admit I didn’t know until after I watched the movie – she owns the scene. Her songs look like scenes from a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical, in the best way: she grabs the camera with both hands and won’t let go until the song is done. And she gets just about all of the best songs, which is ironic with a pop singer elsewhere in the cast. It’s fun to see Gomez playing a vixen, even if the film doesn’t give her much time to vamp it up, and she barely gets to sing at all. She and Gascón are wasted by roles that don’t really make enough use of their talents.

The result is a film that is oddly boring for one that has some comic elements, a lot of song and dance, and eventually a big action scene. That last bit isn’t even that well earned, and leads to an ending that is an inexcusable copout where Emilia is no longer even in control of her own fate. That conclusion also underscores just how superficial Emilia Pérez ultimately is as a film: It has so little to say that it was completely fine resolving its plot with a figurative lightning bolt from the sky to wrap things up. What a waste of an opportunity.

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