Movie Reviews
The Girl with the Needle movie review: Denmark’s Oscar nominee is a gothic, visually arresting fairy tale
Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle makes the careful decision to paint the entire film in black and white. It is the first aspect of the frame that strikes the viewer, where the absence of colour places the viewer immediately in cinematographer Michał Dymek’s depiction of World War One-era Copenhagen.
Narrow alleys, the dark corners of a factory, the smoke rising out of an old bathhouse- these are elements so crucial and evocative to this often nightmarish, grim tale about a woman left to figure out her place in the world. Her search, along with the viewer over the stretch of two hours, will lead her towards uncompromising answers. (Also read: Emilia Perez leads Oscars 2025 race with 13 nods but slammed in Mexico as ‘insensitive’ film trivialising drug violence)
The premise
Fresh after scoring an Oscar nomination in the Best International Feature category for Denmark, The Girl with the Needle is not an easy watch in any way. It does not want the viewer to nestle into the gorgeous tapestry of the era. There’s nothing dream-like about the past when it had to face such horrific consequences of war. Magnus von Horn’s gaze is on the populace who were away from the frontline, whose lives were affected nevertheless. In the first few minutes that the film introduces Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), she has already lost the roof above her head and is barely surviving on her own in the local factory.
Given she has no proof of the presumed death of her husband, Peter (Besir Zeciri), Karoline is denied the widow’s compensation. Her infatuation with the factory’s boss and hope for a better future also ends disastrously. She ends up pregnant, unemployed and homeless. It is only when Karoline meets Dagmar Overbye (Trine Dynholm), a local bakery owner who also promises to donate her baby, that she finds some semblance of hope.
What works
But as The Girl with the Needle insists, hope is akin to the brief incandescence of a candle, which can burn itself fully for its own good. Karoline’s search for hope balances out her capacity for evil, which is vividly captured in the near-wordless performance of Vic Carmen Sonne. Even as Karoline endures the harshest of disparity and loss, Sonne never turns her into a woman who demands sympathy. She is a victim of her own place, a woman whose search for autonomy in a deeply unjust and selfish society has no light at the end of the tunnel.
The Girl with the Needle is often punishing and difficult to watch, but Magnus von Horn never sensationalizes the horrors in Karoline’s journey. There is visual and aural mastery in the way he grounds the sense of despair in the frame, aided with a hypnotic score by Frederikke Hoffmeier. I was often reminded of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, where the abject naturalism of the protagonist’s domesticity creates a suffocating intrigue for her future. Where shall Karoline go? Who will see her more than just flesh? The true life story, which serves as loose inspiration for her story, is handled with an upsetting degree of rigour.
Even as The Girl with the Needle takes the viewer to dark and discomforting places, there is nuance in the process and an unshakeable trust in humanity that truly grounds this film. It is striking, vivid and altogether unforgettable.