Velvety shadows cut into the pristine fabric of light like sharp daggers, and faces contort with devious abandon under the weight of a brutal existence. Amidst the cold indifference of a stony city, a warm friendship is first forged and then cataclysmically broken. A visual feast of glorious strangeness, The Girl with the Needle offers us a beautiful, audacious monster, the likes of which we haven’t seen in nigh on a hundred years.
Directed by Magnus von Horn, who co-writes the script alongside Line Langebek Knudsen, The Girl with the Needle takes place in 1919 Copenhagen, following a young factory worker named Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) who finds herself pregnant after a torrid affair with her factory’s owner, Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), who swiftly dumps and fires her. Lacking the funds or desire to raise a child on her own, Karoline attempts an abortion by sticking a needle up herself in a bath house. Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) quickly intervenes and tells the young woman that she can help her — once Karoline gives birth, she should bring the baby, and some money for a fee, to Dagmar, who will find an adoptive home for the baby. Dagmar secretly, illegally, runs an adoption agency out of a candy shop. Karoline does as she’s told and finds herself feeling relieved and empowered; she feels safe in Dagmar’s assurance that the woman will place her baby in a much more comfortable setting than Karoline could ever provide.
Karoline begins to admire the work Dagmar does for others who don’t want to be mothers, and, without work herself, asks Dagmar if she can help her help other women like herself. She moves into Dagmar’s shop and the two women form a strong bond. But things turn sinister when, out of curiosity, Karoline follows Dagmar on her way to deliver a baby to its adoptive family. The story is based on the story of a Danish woman named Dagmar Overbye.
The Girl with the Needle casts its velvety expressionist lushness within the stark frame of a chalky realism, to turn the tale of women living at the fringes of society into an impassioned horror. As if in the hazy undertow of a perennial high, Karoline and Dagmar often become hypnotically consumed by their love for each other and their own desires as they move through society. Karoline’s hunger for Jørgen in the film’s first half drips lasciviously off of her, and she moves with strength and gusto toward the man, nowhere near possessing a demure coquettishness that the upper-class women about her do. Dagmar, meanwhile, is a stalwart working woman who has independently forged a stable livelihood for herself, having learned early on that the world is unfit and unwilling to provide for or satisfy her desires, which is already renegade of her to want to nurse and quench. Under Dagmar’s strong guidance and care, Karoline finds a way to thrive within her low place on the social hierarchy For a blissful while, the two women come together in mesmeric ecstasy, nurturing one another, fostering pleasure and forgetting about pain. In a solidarity like a delicious secret, they find joy and veritably celebrate the verboten: themselves.
The women at the core of this film are seen as monsters by the rest of society, because not only are they working class, they also strive to help other women like themselves. Von Horn’s gaze, meanwhile, is much more celebratory. Rather than feel dejected in their monstrosity, the women take turns relishing it, and so we see them languoring and lingering in their fearsomeness. It makes a delicious sort of sense that von Horn has cast this film in a Fritz Lang-ian black and white. When Dagmar does the unthinkable that Karoline witnesses when she spies on her, the black and white shocks and jolts as it contains Dagmar like an insect in amber, petrifying her in her horrific act — it’s a stunning thing to behold, terrifying as it is. But it’s not just the setting and acts that are cast in macabre but beautiful relief by the the curious and unfrightened gaze of the blanched white and effusive black, it’s also the lead actresses’ faces, whose alluring phantasmagoria van Horn explores like an intrigued and sympathetic reporter.
As Karoline and Dagmar do drugs and recline after a hard day’s work, their eyes become small beady circles of black, taking on a devilish gleam as candlelight glints off them within their close room that grows smaller and smaller until they seem like the only two people in the world. They become little devils, helping other women to get rid of their babies so that they might have a better chance at life, like Karoline herself did; they take the women’s money and build a euphoric pocket happiness for themselves. Both Sonne and Dyrholm are unafraid to make their faces an elastic playground for monstrosity, letting their mouths stretch and yawn within the throes of pleasure from drugs or sex. Their voices boom when they’re angry, and they take up space within their little home when they feel good, and when Karoline feels sad she curls up in bed and lies there for days, militating against the societal mandate to be productive.
The feminine monstrous and grotesque in this film feels contagious, you can feel it in your wide stride as you leave the film. Karoline and Dagmar by example seem to dislodge a certain modicum of decorum as they exist within this stunning film, gulping and laughing and being with hunger. The Girl with the Needle is a lush playground of and for monstrous women, celebrating them by allowing them to roam audaciously, to become little insatiate horrors as they do what feels right, even if for a moment.
