Writer/director Magnus von Horn follows The Here After and Sweat with another intense character study in period drama The Girl with the Needle. This one is loosely inspired by the real life Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye, but von Horn's true inspiration seems to come from the melodramas of the silent era and perhaps from Richard Fleischer's 10 Rillington Place, with which it shares several thematic elements. Like the recent films Woman of the Hour, The Man in the White Van and He Went That Way, it's a movie about a serial killer that is centred not on the killer but on someone unfortunate enough to find themselves in their orbit.
That someone is the fictionalised Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who believes herself widowed at the end of World War One when her husband fails to return home. Karoline's life takes a series of bad turns, leading to her botching an attempt at performing a self-abortion in a public bath house. It's here that she encounters Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who intervenes before Karoline can do irreparable damage to herself. Dagmar informs Karoline that she runs a service that takes unwanted infants and places them in "good homes," for a fee of course. When Karoline gives birth, she takes her baby to Dagmar, who takes pity on Karoline and offers her the dual job of acting as a wet-nurse for the infants she takes in while working in her sweet shop. Ironically, tending to Dagmar's babies brings out the very maternal instincts Karoline previously sought to suppress. But Karoline soon comes to realise that Dagmar's services aren't as advertised, and that the children are far from being housed with "doctors and lawyers," as Dagmar claims.
Von Horn's film follows a narrative path tread by many melodramas of the silent and early talkie eras, that of a protagonist, usually a woman, seeking a way out of awful circumstances only to dig a greater hole for herself, from which she struggles to claw her way out by the end. Like the gangster's moll Sonne portrayed so memorably in Isabella Eklöf's masterful Holiday, Karoline finds herself caught in a hellish circumstance largely as a result of her own ambition. Far from some angelic figure we can easily sympathise with, Karoline is ruthless and manipulative, but the film makes it so clear that she believes this is the only way she can survive in the Darwinian landscape of post-war Copenhagen that we empathise with her actions, even if we recognise them as cruel. Karoline is a woman of few words (I can't distinguish Danish accents but I suspect much of her silence is rooted in Karoline's self-consciousness regarding her lowly class status) and so Sonne's performance often recalls that of a silent star, her big expressive eyes betraying her hopes, fears and motivations.
The Girl with the Needle makes it clear that post-war Denmark is no country for young women, but it doesn't strive for easy feminist points by lazily putting moustache-twirling men in villainous positions. The most sympathetic character in the entire drama is Karoline's husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who eventually returns home from the war with half his face missing, concealed under a mask that gives him the appearance of the Phantom of the Opera. Unlike the striving Karoline, Peter has accepted his circumstances, taking an exploitative job in a circus "freak" show. In a film packed with displays of humanity at its worst, Karoline's cruel dismissal of Peter might be the most difficult to watch, not just for the pain we feel for Peter but as it marks the point where we realise Karoline has lost her moral compass, making her easy prey for someone like Dagmar.
Like the aforementioned 10 Rillington Place, The Girl with the Needle highlights how a society shifting through the rubble of a war allows evil to go unnoticed. Like Richard Attenborough's John Christie, Dagmar presents herself as a kindly parental figure at a time when kindness is difficult to come by, and both killers take advantage of young women desperate to avoid bringing a child into a world that has so recently demonstrated the full extent of its hostility. Early on, von Horn establishes the indifference of the citizens of Copenhagen when Karoline has sex with Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the owner of the clothing factory where she toils as a seamstress, down an alleyway, their moans clearly audible to passersby on the nearby street, yet nobody pays any heed. Later we see Dagmar commit a shocking deed in a similar alley as an oblivious public similarly passes by.
Using her charms, Karoline manipulates Jorgen into agreeing to become her husband, only for her to find herself on the street when Jorgen's Baroness mother refuses to sanction any such marriage. Up to that point Jorgen had been a sympathetic figure, but in his refusal to stand up to his mother he becomes an instant villain. Conversely, Peter is the one character who has truly stood up to evil, and though he's been left physically and mentally scarred in doing so, we get the impression that he's the only figure in von Horn's film who can boast a clean conscience. The Girl with the Needle suggests that evil triumphs when good people do nothing, but it also makes starkly clear the personal cost of taking moral action. By the end of the film Karoline's body and mind are severely damaged, but we're more concerned with how she can repair her conscience and live with the atrocities she has witnessed.
Directed by: Magnus von Horn
Starring: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Joachim Fjelstrup, Tessa Hoder, Avo Knox Martin
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