The Girl with the Needle is showing in cinemas nationwide starting on Jan 10 and will arrive on MUBI later this year.
In 1921, a woman from Copenhagen, Dagmar Overbye, was sentenced to death amid public outrage. Her crimes shocked a nation and sent a shiver through Danish society that would lead to seismic changes in the way births were registered across the country.
Dagmar Overbye killed newborn children for many years. But she didn’t go out looking for babies; the babies came to her, often from impoverished mothers who knew they couldn’t care for their newborn children. None of these women knew Overbye killed their child; they believed she found their baby a new home. But Overbye had blood on her hands, and the exact number of newborn children she murdered remains a mystery, with her conviction based on only eight murders that could be proved. Like many sentenced to death before the abolition of the act in Denmark, Overbye never faced the death penalty and died in prison in 1929, aged 42.
Now, screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen and director Magnus von Horn bring us the semi-fictional story of a woman who comes to Dagmar Overbye seeking her help only to discover the horrors Dagmar has kept hidden from view. The Girl with the Needle is a stunning, dark and terrifying tale that places the horrors of a post-World War One Danish society in the dock alongside Overbye. Langebek and von Horn’s bold and brutal drama, exquisitely shot in low contrast and grainy black and white by Michael Dymek, focuses on Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), one of the many young women who work their fingers to the bone in Copenhagen’s textile mills for a meagre wage that rarely puts bread on the table. Karoline’s husband is still missing following the horrors of World War One, and her only hope for survival is to find another husband who can provide the income needed to live, even if it is in squalor.
When the wealthy owner of the textile mill, Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), shows interest in her, Karoline’s ship appears to have come in, and it’s not long before she is engaged in a passionate and physical relationship that leads to pregnancy. But, while Karoline dreams of a new life of luxury with the father of her unborn child, the mill owner’s mother has other plans, forbidding Karoline from seeing her son again and ending her employment at the mill, leaving her pregnant, broke and unable to pay the rent on her meagre flat.
Moving into a ramshackle attic with no heat and minimal light, Karoline faces the winter alone, pregnant and without a penny to her name. When her missing husband, Peter (Besir Zeciri), returns with a mask that hides his horrific facial injuries, things don’t get any better. His nights are invaded by torment, suffering and trauma, while his days see people laughing at him in the street, calling him a freak and jeering at his survival. In despair, Karoline attempts a termination at the local bathhouse using a large needle. There, she meets Dagmar Overbye (Trine Dyrholm) for the first time, a shopkeeper with a young daughter who insists she can find a home for Karoline’s baby when it’s born, for a price.
In the haunting and bleak opening montage of The Girl and the Needle, we see the faces of each character twist, turn and morph into each other, and that opening montage sets the scene perfectly for what is to come. Each character in Magnus von Horn’s bleak and gut-wrenching drama writhes with pain and sorrow, their fates intertwined through poverty, rejection and despair. Even the brutality of Overbye’s crimes carries a stark and sombre reminder that she was not a serial killer who stalked her prey but a woman who people trusted and approached in their darkest moments. Women handed over their babies to Overbye, knowing they would never see them again, not out of a desire to be free but out of despair and heartbreak. Overbye was the product of a society torn apart by war and an ever-growing gulf between rich and poor – a society where compassion, understanding and charity had died alongside thousands of young men in the muddy trenches of Europe.
Echoing David Lean’s Oliver Twist and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in its style and composition, The Girl with the Needle is an unrelenting, sombre yet striking dissection of poverty, state collapse and a class divide that at times proves almost overwhelming in its bleakness. Yet, it is also utterly compelling, with standout performances from Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm and Besir Zeciri that keep your eyes glued to the screen as Copenhagen’s chimneys billow smoke while despair and oppression haunt its tight, winding, cobbled streets.
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