‘The Girl with the Needle’ Review: Magnus von Horn Serves a Gripping and Bleak Tale of Unspeakable Violence | TIFF

In his third feature, Swedish filmmaker Magnus von Horn delivers a striking look at one of Denmark’s most haunting crimes. What could have been a by-the-numbers retelling of a widely publicized series of murders that shook the nation is instead a much deeper, more contemplative look at the process of making the choices that define us and haunt us for a lifetime.

The pic opens with Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a young seamstress in Copenhagen who is struggling to make ends meet. It is World War One and her husband has gone missing at war. Working at a clothing factory, her salary is barely enough to pay for rent, and she is forced to evict her tiny apartment. After a few superbly filmed sequences in which we follow her as she tries to find a new place to stay with as little as she can afford, fortune seems to have smiled upon her as she starts to attract the attention of the factory owner. Enamored by the promise of a better social status, Karoline musters up the courage and asks him to marry her and, perhaps to her slight surprise, he agrees.

Meanwhile, and to Karoline’s surprise, her long-missing husband emerges, a broken soul and a deformed body that she barely even recognizes at first sight. Grappling with the ghost of a man that her husband has become, Karoline fails to adjust back to her husband’s return, opting to abandon him in hopes of marrying the factory owner who can resurrect her life. But her fairytale-like ambitions soon come to a crushing end when his wealthy family vehemently refuses the marriage, threatening to deprive their son of any and all wealth. Forced to fire her from the factory, Karoline finds herself in a perilous situation that takes a much darker turn when she meets Dogmar (Trine Dyrholm), a shop owner who lends her a hand at a time when no one else would.

From there, the film shifts into a fascinating case study and a thorough examination of the dynamics between the two women. It is this relationship that gives the film its uniqueness and emotional core, partly because it is loosely adapted by the events that actually occurred, and partly because it gives screenwriters Magnus von Horn and Line Langebek Knudsen a meaty opportunity to ask questions and offer possible theories about what might have happened behind closed doors between both women. The screenplay is surely far more interested in examining how the relationship progresses from a simple favor to a tale of captivity of some sorts: what starts as a safe haven for Karoline soon turns into a haunting, inescapable ordeal of regret, silence and shame, as she discovers not only that she’s living with a serial killer under the same roof, but that she also has unknowingly aided her in her deranged operation.

But to know is one thing and to escape is another – after all, can she ever run away from the torment of having witnessed and been part of one of the country’s most elaborate schemes to murder newly born babies? In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Dogmar takes Karoline to a movie theater. Under the influence of a drug, she’s been taking in hopes to forget her intense feeling of shame, she starts to uncontrollably laugh at the glowing cinema screen, a shadow of a woman she once was, with her weary eyes navigating the giant image projected upon her, and an anguished grin that reflects deep pain concealed by the sounds of laughs as they penetrate the theater silence. A cry for help in a dark room full of strangers, this pivotal moment reflects Karoline’s agony far more powerfully than any line of dialogue could have conveyed it.

Ultimately and at its core, The Girl with the Needle is a film about the choice of abandonment. Several times throughout the narrative, the screenplay places its lead character in situations where she makes conscious, and sometimes unconscious, choices to abandon people, values and ideals at the expense of seeking a better life only to the grapple with the dire consequences of doing so, forcing us to question the choices we make along the way and whether it is ever possible to retract them. But it is not without a glimmer of hope though, as Karoline fights through the darkness to retrieve her sense of identity and finally make the right choices even if it may seemingly be too late.

With stunning black and white cinematography by Michal Dymek, eerie sound design from Oskar Scriver, score by Frederikke Hoffmeier and impeccable performances by the film’s two leads, Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm, The Girl with the Needle is pure cinema – a film that reminds us why movies can evoke an essential sense of questioning and contemplation, offering us a much-needed invitation to look within ourselves and reexamine the choices that have long defined us.

Grade: A-

This review is from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. MUBI will release The Girl with the Needle theatrically in select theaters in the U.S. on December 6, 2024.