The Girl With the Needle

It’s often said that the greatest incentive toward crime is desperation. If that were so, then Karoline Nielsen, the protagonist/victim of Danish crime thriller The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen), would be justified in having a vendetta against society. As played by Vic Carmen Sonne (Holiday, Godland), despair weeps from every pore, but so does a sly resilience. She is a survivor of horror, a Dane in the closing hours of World War I who faces the new privations of postwar life.

But there’s a counterargument that there must be a darker seed that takes root for truly horrifying crimes to be committed. In writer/director Magnus von Horn’s quiet nightmare, an Academy Award nominee for Best International Feature, the soil has been drenched in enough blood and heartache, with shattered veterans and starving babies a fact of life. It’s a time of harsh shadows and layers of darkness, caught in calm, static black and white by cinematographer Michal Dymek (EO, A Real Pain). Visually, it’s a radical departure from the saturated, handheld look of his last film with von Horn, influencer drama Sweat, but equally fixated on the isolation of women. In Sweat, it’s the distancing effect of social media that creates divides. What makes Karoline feel so detached is her societal status, and that she’s falling ever further down the order, from married woman to pregnant, jobless, homeless woman.

That desperation leaves her open to an act of seemingly selfless kindness from Dagmar, played by Trine Dyrholm. A longtime collaborator with both Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration, The Commune) and Susanne Bier (In a Better World, Love Is All Your Need), she seems to glow in a world of point light sources, of candles and flickering firelight that scarcely illuminates the darkness that refuses to leave Denmark even after the armistice has been declared. That Dagmar runs an unlicensed adoption agency out of a candy store makes her seem like a saint in a city of bleakness and debris.

Dagmar is based on a real historical figure, Dagmar Overbye. Hers is a name that may be unfamiliar to international audiences, even if it will invoke a flinch of disgust among Danish viewers. The information gap oddly assists von Horn’s purpose in The Girl With the Needle, to explore the differences between the desperate and the monstrous. When Dagmar takes Karoline for a rare afternoon of pleasure – doing ether drops in a cinema – it’s intended to catch the audience off guard to humanize someone capable of the truly despicable and vile. Mercy is inverted and abused, and the viewer must navigate the revelation of who Dagmar is. And, yes, the candy store was real, a horrifying twist that makes her seem like a fairy-tale villain but only amplifies the truly grotesque nature of Overbye’s crimes.

The real historical details undoubtedly cause greater issues in how The Girl With the Needle depicts Karoline. The fictional character is broadly based on the real Karolina Aagesen, who finally reported Overbye to the police. In von Horn’s script, she becomes an unwitting accomplice, and in doing so the film comes close to overly humanizing Overbye at Aagesen’s expense. Mercifully, the film’s reserved tone prevents Dagmar from manipulating our compassion too much. Instead, in its depiction of a city mired in chaos and despair, it keeps the cruelty of unseen violence within context, while raising its underlying question: How can you live with yourself after being party to atrocities? What combination of justifications, purgation, and contrition is enough? Its answers are uneasy and disquieting, and the true root of its horror.