The Girl with the Needle: Magnus von Horn’s grand guignol nightmare of infanticide

Fiction is littered with unwanted children. Their lots are rarely happy. From Oliver Twist to Harry Potter, these orphans are, as Dickens has it, pale with anxiety and sadness and the closeness of their prison. Longing for love while looking like death.

Opening with a series of deformed, grimacing portraits – faces snarled into rictuses, as if Francis Bacon’s screaming portraits had sprung to terrible life – The Girl with the Needle takes Dickens’s simile horribly literally. The sequence sets the tone for Magnus von Horn’s grand guignol nightmare of infanticide, loosely adapted from the real-life story of Dagmar Overbye, a Danish woman who murdered as many as 25 babies between 1913 and 1920.

Von Horn chooses to focus not on Overbye herself (played here by stalwart of Danish cinema Trine Dyrholm) but on Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a scrappy seamstress living hand-to-mouth in postwar Copenhagen. Heavy browed and frizzy haired with large, deep-set eyes, she’s not an altogether sympathetic figure, at least not at first. We’re unsure as to whether she really is widowed, as she claims. And it is unclear as to who is manipulating who when she begins an affair with the owner of the factory where she works. A twist of a lip or sly hook of an eyebrow suggests she’s not quite the innocent she might seem. But by the time she finds herself pregnant, abandoned by her lover and caring for a traumatised and disf igured husband, she’s definitely out of her depth. And when she turns to a seemingly kindly stranger for help, she slips further below the surface of the morass.

Shot in high-contrast monochrome, Von Horn’s Copenhagen has a gothic quality. Cinematographer Michał Dymek and production designer Jagna Dobesz conjure a world of winding cobblestone streets, steaming bathhouses and Escher-like staircases. Skewed, anxiety-inducing angles and deepfocus shots lend a sense of looming dread, dwarfing Karoline or boxing her in. Often, only the central third of the screen is visible, the outer edges bleeding into the shadowy abyss. There are shades of Lynch’s Elephant Man (1980) and early von Trier, as well as Brady Corbet’s The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and even Ryan Murphy’s TV series American Horror Story (2011-). As befits the period setting, though, the primary visual influence seems to be the expressionist cinema of Murnau, Wiene and Lang, which evoked what the film critic Lotte Eisner called Helldunkel – literally, bright-dark, chiaroscuro, a twisted and grotesque outer world which reflects the internal angst of a Europe haunted by the horrors of war.

The film draws a direct line from the bodies piled up on the battlefield to the nightmarish city that Karoline inhabits. The disenfranchisement of Karoline and her husband – the latter so badly maimed that the only work he can find is as a circus freak – is a consequence of war. So are the smothered babies that Overbye drops into sewers and burns in furnaces. Like Robert Helpmann’s infamous Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Dyrholm’s beadyeyed confectioner-cum-executioner, whose backroom activities take place above a sweetshop, is both saccharine and sinister. She, too, is a monster forged in the fires of war. She insists that she is doing her victims a favour. After all, when millions have been murdered, what are a few lives more? And what quality of life would these children and their mothers have, without her help? A sinuous track through an orphanage packed with blank-faced children suggests she may just have a point.

At the time of the film’s making, the future of women’s reproductive rights in the US hung in the balance. No prizes for guessing that the needle of the title is a knitting needle, used by Karoline to attempt an unsuccessful abortion. Von Horn’s previous film, Sweat (2020), examined the effects of social media on today’s female psyche. The Girl with the Needle is viscerally suggestive of the effects on society when children are born to mothers who don’t want them. Frederikke Hoffmeier’s atonal score fuses with the sound of screaming newborns to enervating effect. The film’s momentum rides on the desperate desire to make it all stop. But while Dagmar and Karoline find temporary respite in ether and the movies, the audience is afforded no such relief.

Von Horn isn’t making a social treatise but an adult fairytale. True to form, Karoline finds a happy ending of sorts. Still, after the credits have rolled, what lingers in the memory is the stench of fear and the shuddering horror of this rotten world, which might not, after all, be so far from our own. 

► The Girl with the Needle is available in UK cinemas from 10 January 2025.