The bleakness of Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle is intimate and inescapable. Loosely inspired by the story of Dagmar Overbye, a Danish child caretaker turned serial killer in the 1920s, von Horn has crafted an unearthly portrait of survival in a society built to fail its most vulnerable, anchored by standout performances from Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne. The film drags us into the suffocating gloom of early 20th-century Copenhagen — you can practically smell the soot and the delectable assortment of body odours.
Comparisons to Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole are inevitable, given its obsessive focus on desperation, moral rot, and the crushing weight of systemic failure. Yet, unlike the brutality of Balagov’s vision, this one wraps its bleakness in a strange, almost ferocious empathy for the forgotten souls it scrutinises (though that empathy might be overshadowed by a melange of disturbing imagery you’ll wish you could scrub from your memory with industrial-strength bleach). From the first frame, von Horn makes it clear that the world his characters inhabit is unremittingly hostile, dripping with sweat, grime, and menace.
The city itself is a montage of silhouettes, captured in a strikingly bleak, high-contrast black-and-white by Michał Dymek, that calls to mind the claustrophobia of German Expressionism. Every frame looks like a vintage photograph that someone forgot to dust, its cracks and shades inundating what little hope exists. Copenhagen itsel.
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