The Girl with the Needle

Magnus van Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, or Pigen Med Nålen, starts out as a fairly conventional mishmash of well-worn narratives – but boy does it not end up there.

A young woman called Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) believes she has lost her husband in the First World War but is left destitute as he is regarded as missing and so she is ineligible for a widow’s pension. She falls into the arms of Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the aristocratic owner of the factory where she works after his offer to “help” leads to “romance”.

Karoline falls pregnant and he promises marriage, while her husband (Besir Zeciri) has returned from the war brutally disfigured and suffering from shellshock. She shuns her husband for what she thinks is a better life, only for Jorgen’s mother to intervene with the threat to cut him off from his fortune. Jorgen chooses fortune.

So far, these are stories that we’ve heard since ancient times. The only clue that something odder may be afoot is Frederikke Hoffmeier’s score and van Horn and his young cinematographer Michal Dymek’s outstanding visual depiction of early 20^th-century Denmark in black and white. It’s grimy, almost medieval in its impoverished backstreets, while being menacingly prim in well-to-do houses. There’s also something of Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse in the way the grey colour palette creates a sense of foreboding.

Then things begin to take a weird and gradually more horrifying turn. Karoline attempts a makeshift abortion in a bathhouse (the “girl with the needle” of the title) and is rescued by a kindly fellow bather Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) – who then offers to help her when the baby is born by finding it a good family.

To avoid spoiling things while hinting at what’s to come, one can just say that it’s based on a real, famous Danish criminal case from the period – and Dagmar may not be the selfless altruist she initially seems. The second half also shocks and scars and gives you a sense of a visceral descent into hell.

After leaving the film, this writer actually felt a bit shaken and I think I know why. Because van Horn uses skills and techniques you might find in a genuinely frightening Gothic horror to depict the terrifying and hopeless experiences of real social deprivation.

The Girl with the Needle is at times a hard watch – but it’s a film that will genuinely stay with you for a long time.

Mark Worgan

The Girl with the Needle does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

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