The Girl With the Needle is based on some true, and incredibly disturbing, events, but to even bring up its historicity can feel like a bit of a spoiler. Eventually revolving around the real case in 1919 Denmark of serial baby murderer Dagmar Overbye, Magnus von Horn’s film takes such a long, upsetting road to even get to the centrepiece real horror that by the time we get there, there’s a good chance you’ll already be numbed to the miseries. Von Horn takes his time to build up a world where this course of action feels believable and possible and, to an extent, it’s slow burn work that pays off, but at the expense of being able to truly move you.
Dagmar (as played by Trine Dyrholm, doing a very fine line in looking genuinely dead behind the eyes) is not our main character, though. Instead, we follow a fictional young working class woman who, through desperation and being straight-up lied to, will eventually become Dagmar’s assistant in her business of telling desperate women that she will find new parents for their babies, before killing them in a secluded spot. This is Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), whose journey into Dagmar’s arms of poverty, humiliation, a cowardly rich man and his evil mother, pregnancy, a presumed-dead husband returning from the war with half his face blown up, and an attempted self-administered abortion is so relentlessly and grotesquely bleak that it loses the power to shock quite fast.
There is a tiny bit of light in the simple, earnestly kind loyalty shown to Karoline by her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) even as she brings home another man’s baby, but this is swiftly snuffed out when Dagmar enters the scene. Promising to find a foster family for Karoline’s baby (for a fee, of course) she soon has the now child-free Karoline under her employ as an assistant and wet nurse for the other babies that pass through Dagmar’s house before their eventual fate, keeping Karoline ignorant of the truth until she deems her complicit enough.
Very eerily shot and scored in a stark black and white that moves between grim reality and some surreal avant-garde oddness, The Girl With the Needle definitely succeeds in painting a grisly, stinking picture of the life of a poor woman in early-20th Century northern Europe, and it’s genuinely creepy when it wants to be. Most of this comes from Dagmar’s adoptive daughter Erena, a girl of six or seven who seems to be one of the rare babies that Dagmar ‘fostered’ but let live, who gets some outright skin-crawling scenes that, honestly, actually had me a little worried for the actual child actor involved.
Yet, even these moments struggle to really hit home, stuck as they are in the morass of hideous pain and unhappiness that makes up every minute of The Girl With the Needle. With a true story as horrible as this, perhaps a gruelling endurance test is the only truthful way to bring it to the screen, but this one-note dirge of female-on-female violence, conducted under the wilfully ignorant noses of the men who built a world where this violence is necessary, is too wretched to recommend in any good conscience.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Great in-depth review! It seems like “The Girl With the Needle” offers a chilling and dark portrayal of a disturbing true story. How did the film’s stark black and white cinematography enhance the unsettling tone of the narrative?