{"id":10738,"date":"2025-04-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10738"},"modified":"2025-04-16T20:37:52","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T00:37:52","slug":"the-girl-with-the-needle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/04\/17\/the-girl-with-the-needle\/","title":{"rendered":"The Girl with the Needle."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Girl with the Needle<\/em> was Denmark\u2019s submission for this year\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, or you can rent it on iTunes<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s been no word from him in a year. She\u2019s evicted from her rooms when the film opens, but when goes to her boss to try to get help obtaining widow\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s help, at another job the older woman helped her find, and she pays Dagmar to give the baby to another family; when she can\u2019t pay all of what she owes, she goes to work in Dagmar\u2019s candy shop and helps convince other women to give their babies up as well, until she becomes suspicious that Dagmar isn\u2019t what she seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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 <\/em>that he chose to find \u201cfinding the humanity in these horrible deeds<\/a>,\u201d which is a bold strategy, given what Dagmar was doing. (There\u2019s no direct violence in the film; the only murder that takes place on the screen is hidden from our and Karoline\u2019s view.) That choice means that the film can only succeed or fail on the quality of the script and of the two lead performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s conning. (I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s young daughter, Erena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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\u2019s story in Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>, 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\u2019t seen before. It needs Dagmar\u2019s character to at least give us something new, even if it\u2019s 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\u2019s still dark and unsparing, but a far more intriguing story, and a better watch due to the two strong leads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(I still haven\u2019t seen the winner of the Best International Film category, the Brazilian film I\u2019m Still Here<\/em>, but it\u2019s loaded up for my next flight; of the other four, I\u2019d put this second, behind the German submission The Seed of the Sacred Fig<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Girl with the Needle was Denmark\u2019s submission for this year\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1464,943,215],"class_list":["post-10738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-international-feature-nominees","tag-danish-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10739,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10738\/revisions\/10739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}