The Girl with the Needle

Based on a true story so grim it’ll have you wishing truth weren’t actually stranger than fiction, The Girl with the Needle is a kind of fairytale that serves to reminds how bleak most folklore is. Magnus von Horn, along with co-writer Line Langebek Knudsen, has taken one of his country’s darker chapters and turned it into a storybook all his own — one that somehow, against all odds, ends on a hopeful note.

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It begins with faces: some belonging to men, others to women, rotating and merging like a black-and-white kaleidoscope that contorts the subjects’ features while also bringing them into focus. It finally settles on Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), whose looming eviction will seem positively quaint by the time the credits roll. It’s Copenhagen shortly after the First World War, a conflict from which her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) has yet to return. She takes a job doing needlework in a sewing factory, leading to a love affair with the owner that leaves her pregnant. “I can’t believe you are mine,” Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup) says to her after one of their more passionate dalliances. But is she really?

Though presumed dead, Peter returns shortly after Jørgen’s grand pronouncement. Half of his face is covered in a mask to cover what befell him in the war, but his real wounds aren’t visible. He seems a stranger to Karoline now, and so she angrily sends him away only to find herself a single soon-to-be mother after the matriarch of Jørgen’s family states in no uncertain terms that the two will never wed. This ping-ponging ends with Karoline being taken in by an older woman named Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who owns a candy store and runs a clandestine business relieving women of their unwanted babies and selling them to well-off clients who can’t conceive on their own.

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“Why would you help me?” Karoline asks Dagmar after her initial offer of assistance. Her response: “Who else would?” If this endeavor sounds altruistic, you might have The Girl with the Needle confused with another movie. Opening in limited release today, the film has been chosen as Denmark's submission for Best International Film at the Academy Awards. It's won the award several times, most recently for Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round in 2020, but never for something quite so dolorous.

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What follows is as sad as it is disturbing. Von Horn is matter-of-fact in his approach and never overplays his hand, but his characters’ plight is inherently distressing. Everyone seems to accept that plight, as though they either can’t envision or don’t have it in them to strive for something better. Denmark officially remained neutral in World War I and was spared the worst of it, but some 30,000 Danes from Southern Jutland fought for Germany and more than 5,000 never returned. Peter might be the film’s most tragic character, reduced to appearing as a sideshow attraction in the local circus. You almost expect von Horn to channel The Elephant Man even more explicitly than he already is by having him turn to the jeering audience and shout “I am a human being!”

If this endeavor sounds altruistic, you might have The Girl with the Needle confused with another movie.

The line that resonates most in The Girl with the Needle is also the one we hear repeated the most: “You’ve done the right thing.” The first time we hear Dagmar say this, it seems an act of kindness to ease Karoline’s conscience. But the more we hear her say it — and the more we learn about Dagmar — the more it seems as though she’s trying to convince herself of something she knows to be untrue.

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Sometimes in order to live in this world we have to believe it’s a better place than it really is. If The Girl with the Needle is a difficult watch — and, it cannot be stressed enough, it is — that’s only because it disabuses us of so many comforting notions while sharing its own hard truths. Call it the feel-bad movie of the year.