150 Word Review: 'The Girl With The Needle' (2024)
Child care
By the time Vic Carmen Sonne’s Karoline hands her newborn over to Trine Dyrholm’s Dagmar for adoption in post-WWI Copenhagen, there have been multiple unsettling scenes: a wounded vet with half a face, shoveling food under a mask, an attempted abortion in a public bath. Karoline thinks her ticket out of poverty is an affair with the factory owner, but he can’t marry her, even when she tells him the baby is his. He’s pathetic.
Director Magnus von Horn’s gorgeous black-and-white, Danish-language historical fable The Girl With the Needle is based on a true story about a serial killer and contains elements of horror. Sonne’s performance is incredible. Her Karoline is desperate and stubborn; she agonizes beautifully.
Dyrholm’s Dagmar is inscrutable, a woman who claims she’s helping vulnerable mothers. The Girl With the Needle takes place in an exhausted society where the men are broken, and women prey on women.