Imagine reading Oliver Twist and suddenly Jack the Ripper turns up in it. The Girl with the Needle (Pigen med nålen in the original Danish) is a bit like that. A bracingly miserablist trek through the life of one of the urban poor in post-First World War Denmark, its Dickensian traipse from one grim situation to the next is interrupted towards the end with the dawning realisation that its heroine, poor benighted Karoline, has somehow wandered into the orbit of Dagmar Overby, Denmark’s most prolific serial killer.
The film never tells us that the Dagmar on screen is Overby but the woman portrayed is presented as a serial murderer of infant children, which is what Overby was, so join those two dots any way you like apart from in a straight line.
It is a tale of almost comic woe, of a piece with those misery memoirs you used to get about living in an Ireland of abusive drunk fathers and baby-machine mothers – plus endless rain – but presented in such a beautiful, painterly monochrome that the images appear almost to be laughing ironically at poor Karoline as she slides from bad to worse.
As the film opens she is being evicted from the room she used to share with her husband until he went off to war and her life started falling apart. From here, the pretty Karoline is courted by her boss, only to become pregnant by him at just the point when her husband comes back from war with half his face shot away, and wearing a prosthetic that cannot disguise the animal sounds he now makes as he tries to eat and drink with most of his right cheek missing.
It gets worse. The title is explained by the film’s grimmest scene, in which Karoline attempts to perform an abortion on herself with a knitting needle while in a tin bath at the public wash house. It’s at this moment that she first meets Dagmar, who seems like a decent sort on first impressions.
Drug addiction and the deaths of quite a few babies are to follow, while the story holds out tantalising suggestions of escape for poor Karoline, who has done nothing to deserve all the grief apart from having been born poor.
It is a tale of a brutal sentimental education, as if Dickens had somehow got hold of something with the sweep of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and given it a workhouse makeover.
At a certain point I started to wonder – is there really going to be no joy? And among the many things that Magnus von Horn’s film does really well is keep its audience holding on, hoping against hope that Karoline is going to cop at least something on the upswing. Will she ever even smile?
There is joy to be had in looking at the cinematography by Michael Dymek – what is it with Poles being able to do black and white so well? In the angular soundtrack by Frederikke Hoffmeier, which goes for synth squawks, rattles and rumbles. And in the performances by Vic Carmen Sonne, whose Karoline is a stupid woman, the last to work out who and what Dagmar is, when her fellow factory worker Frida (Tessa Hoder) has sussed it in an instant.
It is rare for an actor to present their character as unintelligent and unheroic – unless it’s being done for laughs – but Sonne selflessly does so, which is doubly impressive when you consider that she’s up against the formidable Trine Dyrholm, who plays Dagmar as a complex, sly, dangerous but also gracious woman. Dyrholm is the magnificent to Sonne’s dejected, her eyes flashing in a performance reminiscent of Bette Davis at her peak. Wait for the courtroom scene when she rounds on the women gathered like witches behind her and mounts a quasi-feminist defence of her actions. Woof!
Nostalgia hounds, there is nothing for you here.
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
