OSCARS 2025: The Girl with the Needle (2024)

If you listen to the kids on TikTok who are way too defensive about how they mostly watch superhero movies and cartoons, there is a certain breed of pretentious film fans out there who despise all mainstream Hollywood productions and only watch crushingly long, incredibly depressing, black and white arthouse movies from Europe. As if “Into the Spider-Verse” and “Sátántangó” are the only two types of films you can choose from. This stereotype is unfounded and untrue except for one part: If you are looking for a long, bleak, monochromatic flick, Europe is the place you're probably going to find it. The Scandinavian parts of the globe, in particular, are never beating the allegation as the home for this kind of motion picture. Look no further than Denmark's latest submission for Best International Picture, “The Girl with the Needle.” Movies that are kind of a bummer aren't unheard of around Oscar season but this easily takes the cake as the most punishingly glum of 2025's nominees. Is this film from the awesomely named Magnus von Horn only crushing misery porn or does it have some merits of its own outside of being really sad? 

Copenhagen, near the end of the First World War, is a dreary place for Karoline. She believes her husband to have died on the battlefield but, because his body was never found, she can't collect widow's compensation. Her job in a sewing factory doesn't provide enough cash to pay her rent and her bitchy landlord is already showing her apartment to other potential renters. She decides to seduce Jørgan, her boss, and the two begin an affair. After becoming pregnant, they plan to marry but Jørgan's strict mother forbids it. Also, it turns out her husband isn't dead but merely hideously deformed, suffering from PTSD, and impotent. Homeless and broke, Karoline goes to a local bath house and attempts to abort her pregnancy. She nearly dies but is rescued by an older woman named Dagmar and her young daughter, Erena. Dagmar runs a shady operation of buying and selling unwanted babies and promises to find a home for Karoline's child. Afterwards, to keep a roof over her head, Karoline convinces Dagmar to allow her to live there and work as a wet nurse. However, while developing a disturbing relationship with Dagmar and her daughter, Karoline soon uncovers the horrible truth about what is happening here. 

Good news, everybody! "The Girl with the Needle" belongs to the cinematic genre I love the most but is usually ignored by the Academy. Yes, this is a horror movie. There are no otherworldly beasties or supernatural curses present. However, the film establishes a doom-laden atmosphere from its first scene, a nightmarish montage of swirling, deformed faces. Karoline's veteran husband is grotesque and pathetic enough a character to classify as a monster in the Quasimodo/Gwyplaine sense of the word. That's a comparison the film seems to encourage, as he eventually finds gainful employment in a Tod Browning-esque travelling freak show. Mostly, "The Girl with the Needle" exists on the margins of horror by being inspired by the true story of Dagmar Overbye, the most prolific serial killer in Denmark's history. (Her actual tally of victims might be as high as 25 but there was only enough evidence to convict her for a mere nine. Either way, Denmark is way behind the rest of the world in terms of murder.) Not that Dagmar was an unstoppable Jason Voorhees-like slasher. No, she targeted the most vulnerable of individuals: Unwanted, newborn babies that she would buy from desperate mothers and then dispose of after getting paid. I don't think director von Horn would discourage classifying the film as horror either. He has referred to it as "a fairy tale for grown-ups." It shares the Brothers Grimm's fascination with protagonists adrift in worlds that have no use for them and child-killing old witches. 

The film successfully draws us into that world too, a nightmarish neither land devoid of hope. That world isn't a faraway fairy kingdom or medieval village. Instead, it's our world. The real horror of "The Girl with the Needle" is being a woman in a brutally patriarchal society. In 1900s Denmark, women have few options for employment. Working in the sewing factory sticks Karoline in the traditional feminine role of being a seamstress but her body, the organs that take sperm and turn them into a fetus, is the only thing she has that the world truly deems valuable. This is further emphasized by a ruffian tenant of Dagmar's, who nearly rapes Karoline and later has rough sex with with the old woman. Her landlord accuses her of being a prostitute at one point. Her worth as a person is tied directly to her husband, who has been rendered an undesirable wretch by the horrors of war. The film repeatedly returns to the image of a woman suckling a child, depicted as farce by a bearded lady in the circus. This indicates how the sacred bond between mother and child has been transformed into a solely transactional activity by such a heartless culture. Getting impregnated by and marrying her rich boss is Karoline's only option for upward mobility. Unfortunately for her, Copenhagen in 1919 is full of other women who have learned that their survival is dependent on being as ruthless to members of their own gender as the men around them are. Karoline's landlord, Jørgan's mother, and Dagmar – who is also abusive to her own daughter, by the way – persist by becoming utterly cruel crones. The presentation of the time period's wanton misogyny, outward and internalized, is a stark reminder of how little society's treatment of women has actually improved. 

It's an unrelentingly bleak story, obviously. In addition to the infanticide, degradation of women, war wounds, poverty, and child abuse, the film also throws in drug addiction. One of the few joys Karoline experiences is the high a dropper of ether can give her. Dagmar gets her addicted to keep her compliant. Oh yeah, she attempts suicide once or twice too. Despite being utterly grim stuff, I don't think "The Girl with the Needle" is nihilistic for its own sake. When Dagmar is finally brought to justice for her crimes, she claims she was actually doing a service to the babies she murdered. That they were doomed to grow up unloved in a world cruel enough to discard them before their lives even begin. She considered her crimes an act of mercy, saving unwanted children from a life of misery. Considering the hopeless environment "The Girl with the Needle" occupies, you can't help but think that the serial child murderer actually kind of has a point. However, the movie does end in something of a hopeful place. Or as hopeful as it can be after two hours of unrelenting horrors. The suggestion seems to be that planet Earth is full of cruelty and evil but, when you show others kindness, there is a reason to keep going. So maybe Dagmar should have loved those babies, instead of choking the life out of them. Probably didn't need a melancholy Dane to tell me that but it's a valid point nevertheless. 

Obviously, a film this somber and harsh is not going to appeal to everyone. You need to be mentally and emotionally prepared for a pure injection of misery like this. I'll admit, the film's doomy ambiance eventually won me over. Those repeated nightmares of shadowy faces blending together, until Karoline's face resembles her husband's doomed visage, are intoxicatingly haunting. A shot of the man, mangled face hidden by an expressionless mask, stepping out of the shadows of a staircase is when I realized I was vibing with this despair-fest. This is mostly thanks to the work of cinematographer Michał Dymek. Shot in a claustrophobic aspect ratio – 1.50:1 to be exact, an increasingly popular ratio for grim indies like this – the film's stark photography is quickly absorbing. Often shooting the characters from a distance, against the rough urban setting, the camera mimics the point of view of a dispassionate God. Such as in the chilling sequence, where we watch from the doorway as Karoline and Dagmar fight over a child. Sometimes, however, the film can't prevent itself from getting in closer at its dark images. When the husband awakens in the grips of a screaming flashback, the scene plays out as pure black and white gothic cinema. Several moments of sickening violence become more intense by the way the camera slowly closes in on the sight of a large needle or the open manhole into a churning sewer. It's entirely possible that, if not for the incredibly striking and expressive visuals, I wouldn't have gotten much out of "The Girl with the Needle." But I'm a slut for moody black-and-white photography, especially in service of a horrific story, so here we are. 

The cast is committed to the film's grimey tone. The actors speak in blunt sentences or wails of agony, the Northern European languages proving especially suited to communicating such emotions once again. Vic Carmen Stone is brutal as Karoline, embodying a woman put through the wringer. Trine Dyrholm, as Dagmar, and most of the rest of the case utilize the more understated approach, already numb to the onslaught of torture this world provides them with. Frederikke Hoffmeier's music also goes a long way towards wrapping us up in this living nightmare. "The Girl with the Needle" is not a movie I would recommend to everyone, certainly to nobody who is already feeling depressed or hopeless. I wouldn't be put off by anyone who dismisses it as a simply miserable experience with nothing else to offer it's viewer. However, I guess I am in the target audience for incredibly depressing, black and white arthouse movies from Europe after all. Maybe the FilmTok crowd isn't totally off-base after all. (This one runs a little over two hours, so it's merely Normal Long and not Depressing European Arthouse Movie Long.) If you are in the particular mood for a gorgeously photographed social horror movie that clearly counts Bergman and Dreyer as influences, steel yourself and give "The Girl with the Needle" a look. [8/10]