‘The Girl with the Needle’ Review: Devastating Abortion Drama Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

At first, we assume that the titular needle in director Magnus von Horn’s bleak, disturbing and altogether mesmerizing The Girl with the Needle is the one that near-penniless Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) uses to stitch soldier’s uniforms at the World War I-era Copenhagen factory where she works. Soon, another needle is introduced. It is much larger and Karoline will use it for the most desperate of purposes — to give herself an abortion. The Girl with the Needle is the kind of film where degradations continually pile upon Karoline like dirt shoveled atop a grave. The rare sliver of hope gets blotted out by the filth and soot of a world indifferent to her struggles.

In less assured hands, Karoline’s journey through the muck of early 20th century chauvinism would be either a leaden pre-feminist parable or a show-off attempt at elevated horror. But von Horn has something more ambitious in mind; his film is, instead, a pitch-black argument — couched in DP Michal Dymek’s crisp, black and white visuals and outstanding performances — that society is structured to be apathetic towards women, their bodies and their choices.

And yet, The Girl with the Needle is not a carefully rendered lecture. Von Horn’s painterly control, along with Agnieszka Glińska’s measured cutting and Frederikke Sophie Hoffmeier’s brilliant, multi-layered score, envelops the viewer in an oppressive atmosphere and a tautness that won’t let up. Hard to watch yet gorgeous to behold, The Girl with the Needle is as grim as it is powerfully compelling.

In Post-World War I Copenhagen, Hope Is Smothered in Darkness

Our victim and our tour guide through this dank, Dickensian world is Carmen Sonnewho gained attention as the elder daughter in Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland. Giving Karoline multiple dimensions with her expressive face and almost childlike gait, Sonne’s character is carried deeper into desperation and sadness by her own naiveté and the societal roadblocks aligned against her. Yet she can be strong-willed under the right conditions.

At the outset, however, the poverty-stricken Karoline is getting tossed from her tenement-quality apartment because she’s 14 weeks late on the rent. Her needleworker job barely keeps her afloat and her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who went off to fight for the Allies, hasn’t been heard from in a year. Without a death certificate, Karoline cannot supplement her income with widow’s benefits.

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Von Horn, who co-wrote the script with Line Langebek, often provides Karoline with a glimmer of hope only to have it extinguished just as quicklywith each reversal sending Karoline into a deeper level of Hell. After she finds a disgusting new apartment with a bucket in the middle of the living room for a toilet, Karoline befriends Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), her wealthy and handsome boss. Like most things in this unsparingly drab world, their sex together is a dirty affair in an alley as pedestrians blithely walk by. But it leads to a possible marriage proposal.

In one of the film’s only joyful moments, Karoline practically floats around Jørgen’s gorgeous mansion with the knowledge that such luxury is now hers too. However, when Jørgen’s mother (Benedikte Hansen) forbids her son from marrying a poor seamstress, Karoline finds herself alone, impoverished, and carrying Jørgen’s baby.

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A Tense Drama That’s Grimmer Than a Grimms’ Fairy Tale

The fact that von Horn’s film is called The Girl with the Needle and not Caroline gives one a sense of how anonymous and beneath consideration his heroine is treated. The only genuine grace she is afforded comes with the surprise appearance of Peter, whose face has been so horribly disfigured in the war that he wears a mask to cover the gruesome injury. In von Horn’s telling, the men here are the opposite of what they initially seem. The desirable Jørgen is actually a weak-willed prisoner to his family’s money, while the now-impotent Peter, whose face is so deformed he can only get work in a circus, represents a twisted kind of stability, which may be the only kind of stability available to Karoline.

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The film, which opens with a disturbing montage of anguished faces morphing into one another, conveys such an accomplished sense of slightly heightened reality with its Grimms’ fairy tale aesthetic and tactile sense of place, that it’s a shock to learn it’s based on a true story. The less one knows about the actual events the better, but it’s no spoiler to reveal that Karoline’s attempt to use a knitting needle to abort her baby in a public bathhouse is thwarted by a mysterious woman named Dagmar (the excellent Danish star, Trine Dyrholm). Using a candy store as a front for an underground adoption agency, Dagmar convinces Karoline to hand over her daughter despite Peter’s noble offer to raise the baby as his own.

A Film that Seamlessly Combines Horror, Drama, and Tragedy

Von Horn’s masterstroke here is not succumbing to the temptation of making Dagmar, who is so infamous in Danish history, the focus of the film. Relegating her to a supporting role deepens our investment in Karoline’s story and further advances von Horn’s ideas about female subjugation and the societal rot that exacerbates it. Their friendship, which develops when Karoline moves into Dagmar’s home and becomes a wet nurse to incoming babies, is borne of desperation and need, giving off a chill that suggests this matronly candy shop proprietor is not just a kindly seller of sweets. The fantastic Dyrholm always keeps us intrigued, guessing, and hoping for the best, even if von Horn always has us primed for the worst.

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The Girl with the Needle — Denmark’s submission for the Best International Feature Film Academy Award — features a denouement that honors both the historical record and our desire for Karoline to experience at least the possibility of making a choice she won’t regret. The society that created the conditions which allowed for Karoline’s horrors still exists in various forms, however. Poland, where von Horn currently lives with his family, recently passed some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.

As for Karoline, she’s put through the ringer, yet she hasn’t become so hardened that she can’t recognize and embrace love and kindness when it presents itself. Peter, whose devotion to Karoline never wavers, may have barely survived his time in the trenches of World War I, but Karoline has also served in the trenches. Except these trenches are dug so deep that even today we’ve yet to completely climb out of them. The Girl with the Needledistributed by Mubi, will be released on Friday, December 6.