The Girl with the Needle: Brutal truths concealed behind a veil of civility in this horrific drama

The Girl with the Needle
The Girl with the Needle

The main thing you notice, as Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) leafs through the kindly woman’s notebook, is just how many of its pages have been written on. In pencil in an unassuming, elegant hand there is a seemingly endless list of babies: no names (they were too young to have them) but dates of birth all diligently recorded, followed by the dates each one found its way to the woman’s doorstep.

Her name is Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), and she owns a sweet shop on a winding lane in Copenhagen – though she also runs (or at least claims to run) a clandestine adoption operation on the side. From all over the city, in the First World War’s shadowy aftermath, desperate new mothers made their way to Dagmar’s Delikatesse, whose owner promised them their unwanted children would be found good, loving homes. But as Karoline keeps turning the pages, she knows there can’t be as many homes as this. So where have all these babies gone?

The dark and scorching new film from Magnus von Horn, which premiered in competition at Cannes, draws a grim true story from the Danish capital’s past and spins it halfway to a Grimm one. It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

There really was a Karoline in this story too – who in von Horn and Line Langebek’s telling is a clothing factory worker who falls pregnant by her wealthy, wide-eyed boss (Joachim Fjelstrup). She’s the girl with the needle, diligently stitching uniforms for soldiers by day – though the needle she later smuggles into a bathhouse is a much larger one, used for knitting, which she plans to use to self-administer the abortion her boss’s doctor will not. Von Horn captures the spiralling hopelessness of Karoline’s plight with steely exactitude: from a touchingly sweet across-the-street flirtation with her employer to its urgent consummation in a grubby passageway, to the near-unwatchable scene in which she braces herself to deal with the result. And then, after spotting what she’s about to do, over comes Dagmar.

The Girl with the Needle
The Girl with the Needle - Lukasz Bak

Dyrholm is terrific in this tricky role, exuding a chill even during acts of ostensible kindness that seems to stem from her hard-to-read gaze. Eyes are windows to the soul here, but often come misted over, or boarded up – like those of Karoline’s presumed-dead husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who suddenly returns from the (German) frontline wearing a mask that conceals his disfigured face. The only work this poor soul can find is with a freak show – but as cruel and exploitative as it may be, there is a perverse honesty to it too, as the ringmaster puts the war’s secret, savage consequences in plain sight.

This theme of brutal truths concealed behind a veil of civility is one to which the film returns in its devastating final act. In a sequence mounted by Von Horn with spine-tingling formal control, Karoline follows Dagmar as she pushes her latest infant charge in a pram through Copenhagen’s streets – and while we already understand on a gut level where the journey will end, the confirmation lands with a lurch of pure horror, even as we’re tactfully spared the very worst. The main street may only be feet away, but follow human nature down a dirty alley and you’ll find out what it’s made of.


Cert tbc, 115 mins. Playing at Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced