Danish cinema punches well above its weight on the international stage. Pigen med nålen (The Girl with the Needle) has been showing in cinemas across the country since January, and is in the running to win the Oscar for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards on Sunday night. Shot in stark black-and-white, and directed by the Swedish-born Magnus von Horn, the film presents a fictionalised version of the worst serial killer in Denmark’s history.
I watched Pigen med nålen while in the middle of moving house—a process we thought would take five days, but which dragged out to over a fortnight. We were sleeping in single beds in my in-laws’ admittedly very comfortable, but still subterranean, basement. Our furniture was under a tarp in a heap in their driveway. I’d spent the morning up a ladder in the new apartment, scrubbing grease off the top of the kitchen cabinets.
Perhaps the exhaustion contributed to my reaction to the film. While it is visually beautiful, I found Pigen med nålen to be rather muddled—a work that, while unsettling, doesn’t achieve the level of complexity that it strives for. It’s a gruelling watch with little payoff.
Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a young woman working as a seamstress in a textile factory in Copenhagen. Her husband is missing after volunteering to fight in the First World War. In the opening moments of the film, Karoline is evicted from her apartment. Forced to move into a grim attic room with a leak in the ceiling, she begins an affair with the wealthy and handsome owner of the factory. When she falls pregnant, he agrees to marry her—a plan that his imposing mother quickly puts a stop to. Things worsen from there. During a horrifying scene in a public bathhouse featuring the titular needle, Karoline meets Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), an older woman who promises to help her once the baby is born. ‘Don’t give it a name,’ she tells Karoline.
Dagmar is based on Dagmar Overby. From 1916 until 1920, the historical Overby posed as a foster mother, placing ads in different newspapers and agreeing to illegally adopt newborn children for a fee. The women who contacted her were desperate, unmarried, or dealing with more children than they could afford. Instead of caring for the newborns, Overby recorded their names in a notebook, and murdered them—dropping them into sewer grates, or strangling them before burning their bodies in her stove. It is believed that she murdered around twenty five children in this way, but the precise number isn’t known. Children born out of wedlock were not entitled to state support, and their births were often not registered.
Pigen med nålen is an extremely claustrophobic film. It unfolds as a series of bleak interiors, and seems to have few establishing shots of the city. The film’s unusually narrow aspect ratio contributes to this feeling, trapping the action between horizontal black bars on either side of the frame.
Surrealist visual touches at times left me wishing that the rest of the cinematography had been more experimental. The film opens with a series of disembodied faces emerging out of darkness. The faces split in two, morphing and warping, as though in pain, while a spotlight moves over them at strange angles. The effect is horrifying, demonic—foreheads with teeth, eyes that appear to melt. It seems to be achieved with the analogue cinematic trickery of the 1920s, and I found this nod to the era that the plot depicts to be very pleasing.
The faces in the opening sequence foreshadow the most unsatisfactory aspect of the film. Karoline’s missing husband, Peter, eventually returns from the trenches with a terrible facial injury. He wears a tin mask that covers two thirds of his face, with only his left eye visible. His character plays out through a series of clichés: morphine addiction, night terrors, the ‘monster’ who is more tender with Karoline’s baby than she is. Shunned in Copenhagen, he is reduced to working as a performer in a carnival freakshow. In a climactic sequence, he removes his mask in front of a crowd, while Karoline, who has recognised him on an advertisement, watches from the audience. The camera lingers on both the injury and the horrified reactions of the onlookers—lit from below, they are made to look grotesque themselves. But the lack of development or sustained interest in Peter throughout the film leaves the viewer implicated in this voyeurism.
Pigen med nålen clearly wants to make a political point about women, motherhood, and reproductive rights. Early on, Karoline accompanies the wealthy factory owner to his mother’s house, assuming they are there to announce their engagement. Instead, she is taken to a dining room and forced to undergo a pelvic exam by a male doctor. She submits; the scene is shot as a sexual assault, Karoline gazing vacantly into the distance. When she later gives birth, it is on the floor of the warehouse building where she is working as a labourer, picking up beets from a heap and putting them into a bucket. “Let me see!” screeches an older woman, pulling at Karoline’s underwear. Karoline is more worried about the bucket.
As in its depiction of Peter, the film feels voyeuristic in its treatment of its protagonist. We are never given much of a sense of her interior life; instead we are shown Karoline being violated, Karoline topless under the influence of ether, Karoline being forced to breastfeed a seven-year-old child. Vic Carmen Sonne is beautiful; her performance is intense, but oddly flat. For me, this treatment negates the film’s impulse towards social critique. Karoline emerges not as a three-dimensional figure, but a cipher who exists to suffer and to be looked at.
At the end of the film, Overby’s crimes are discovered. At her trial she delivers a monologue where she shifts the blame for her actions back onto Danish society. (The historical Overby gave no such rationale). “[I killed the babies] because it’s what was needed!” she screeches from the stand. “I only did what you’re too scared to do. In fact, you should give me a medal!”
It’s a fair point, if delivered by a deranged voice. In Western countries a hundred years ago, images of (white, bourgeois) motherhood were glorified, while the bodies of actual mothers were treated with cruelty and contempt. The children they bore out of wedlock were an inconvenience to the state; in turn, the state’s neglect amounted to violence. It’s easy to draw a parallel to conservative lawmakers today, in the United States and elsewhere, who call for (and have succeeded in) the criminalisation of abortion on the grounds of protecting life—while failing to enact social or economic policies to promote the wellbeing of actual mothers and children.
Pigen med nålen is disappointingly uneven in its exploration of these tensions. I found the film unsettling, but I suspect not for the reasons that the director intended.
Great review! Seems like a haunting depiction of motherhood that unfortunately falls into the trauma p*rn category of filmmaking.
More reviews like this, please!