Mubi Monday: The Girl with the Needle (2024)

“The Girl with the Needle is a breathtaking yet harrowing period piece that explores the horrors of desperation and societal neglect.

Based on shocking true events (click through only if you don’t mind key plot spoilers), Oscar-nominated The Girl with the Needle is a haunting and harrowing period piece that delves into the darkest corners of human desperation.

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Magnus von Horn, the film follows the tragic journey of Karoline, a young woman struggling to survive in post-World War I Copenhagen. Her husband, Peter, has been lost at war and presumed dead. Evicted from her extremely modest but comfortable apartment, she must now live in squalor, barely surviving despite toiling long hours as a seamstress at an oppressive linen factory.

A whirlwind romance with the wealthy factory owner, Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), results in her pregnancy and a marriage proposal. But Karoline’s dreams of a bright future come crashing down when Jørgen’s cruel mother deems her an inferior partner. Jørgen readily rejects his future bride at her behest, idly standing by as she is stripped of her only income and potential happiness.

In the midst of these dizzying highs and devastating lows, Peter (Besir Zeciri) returns unexpectedly from the war wearing a terrifying mask that obscures a face brutally disfigured in battle. At first, Karoline cruelly rejects the man who is now a monstrosity. Yet, in the aftermath of her equally pitiable rejection at the hands of Jørgen, she takes him back.

Peter is eager to be a father, even to another man’s baby, but Karoline can’t bear the thought of bringing a life into the world under such dire circumstances.

In a distressing scene, we understand, with great consternation, what the film’s title refers to as Karoline attempts to give herself a dangerous and ghastly procedure to terminate the pregnancy in a woman’s bathhouse.

She’s saved from her fearsome fate by a seemingly kind and benevolent caretaker, Dagmar Overbye, who assists desperate mothers, helping them find suitable homes for their unwanted babies.

As Karoline’s plight unfolds, we witness a gut-wrenching exploration of survival, subjective morality, and the crushing weight of societal neglect.

The Girl with the Needle begins with a haunting sequence of morphing faces, like a chillingly beautiful Lynchian nightmare. What follows is a film as breathtakingly gorgeous as it is soul-crushingly bleak.

Shot in exquisite black and white, the visually stunning The Girl with the Needle possesses the ethereal quality of a gothic fairy tale, where beauty and horror coexist in every frame. The cinematography’s rich chiaroscuro lighting evokes a world of stark contrasts—both literal and thematic—between power and helplessness, privilege and destitution, love and indifference.

Every shot is meticulously composed, drenched in shadow and an ever-present sense of foreboding.

The tension builds relentlessly, each moment steeped in dread as we brace for another devastating revelation. There are no easy resolutions, no comforting reassurances. In a world where happiness is a privilege reserved for the few, we understand instinctively that no happy endings can be found here.

However, this heartrending film is not one to wallow in misery for misery’s sake. Instead, it delivers a searing meditation on motherhood, desperation, and the horror of a society that punishes women for their existence while offering them no real avenues for survival.

It is somewhat reminiscent thematically of a film I recently reviewed, Nia DaCosta’s Little Woods, which also explores how society condemns crime while refusing to acknowledge its own role in creating it. Here, motherhood is not a sacred blessing but a burden, one that many women are left to carry alone, with no support, no options, and no escape.

Where the film truly shines is in its poignant performances. 

Trine Dyrholm is mesmerizing in her cold yet strangely sympathetic portrayal of Dagmar. Though her actions are villainous, she is not a villain in the traditional sense, nor is she given a convenient, redemptive arc. Instead, she is a woman hardened by a world that offers no mercy, a chilling reflection of a society that creates monsters by neglecting those who need help the most.

Vic Carmen Sonne delivers a powerful, fearless performance as Karoline, a young woman whose tragic path intersects with Dagmar’s in ways both heartbreaking and inevitable. Her arc and that of her husband Peter—another lost soul discarded by an indifferent society—serve as damning indictments of a world that perpetuates cycles of suffering and abandonment.

Perhaps most devastating is the film’s sociopolitical resonance.

Set in the aftermath of World War I, in a time of great hardship and limited opportunities for women, its themes feel alarmingly relevant today. As modern societies continue to roll back reproductive rights, forcing desperate women into impossible situations, the film serves as a grim reminder of the dangers of stripping away choice and agency.

It exposes the hypocrisy of a system that demands all babies be born while refusing to provide care or resources for either mother or child, dooming them to cycles of poverty and despair.

The Girl with the Needle does not allow us to look away from these horrors—it demands we acknowledge them.

The film reaches its most shattering moment when it pulls the rug out from under the audience at a crucial turning point, delivering a gut punch that lingers long after the credits roll.

It does not offer easy answers or seek to justify its characters’ choices. Instead, it challenges us to examine the murky moral complexities of survival, where the line between good and evil is not as clear-cut as we would like to believe.

When Dagmar tells Karoline, “The world is a horrible place, but we need to believe it is not so,” it encapsulates the film’s central thesis: that hope is often nothing more than a necessary illusion in a world that thrives on cruelty.

Ultimately, The Girl with the Needle is an important but deeply difficult watch. It is an exploration of suffering, of the ethics of survival, of how morality shifts based on circumstance. Yet, it is not merely a catalog of misery—it is also about resilience, about humanity in the midst of horror, about the unbearable weight of choices made when there are no good options.

Beautiful, brutal, and utterly unforgettable, it is a film that lingers in the bones, forcing us to reckon with both the past and our own present reality.