Eerie, perverse, haunting – these are just some of the words that return again and again to critics’ fingers when writing about The Girl With The Needle. It’s an adult fairytale, a Gothic nightmare, a macabre and hypnotic horror. One must turn to the language of the ephemeral and the grotesque to capture the strange atmosphere of this film, its coiling sense of dread that settles in your stomach and grows with each passing scene.

The Girl With The Needle is director Magnus von Horn’s third feature film, premiering in Cannes as a competitor for the Palme D’Or. It was then distributed by Mubi, where it is available for streaming, and recently competed at the Oscars as Denmark’s submission for Best International Feature Film. It’s safe to say, then, that Horn’s film has successfully made its way into the commercial consciousness – a stunning feat for such a complex, uncommercial film. 

The film is set in 1919 Copenhagen, where our protagonist Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is attempting to survive by working as a seamstress. She lives in deep poverty, unable to claim a widow’s compensation because her missing husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) has not been declared dead from the front. For a moment, Karoline’s life seems to take a turn: her wealthy boss (Joachim Fjelstrup) takes a liking to her, initiating a romance which leaves Karoline pregnant and engaged to be married. This is as good as things get, a distorted image of fairytale hope which is doomed for failure. As Karoline prepares for her new, happy life, her husband Peter returns from the war wearing a mask—underneath, his face is mutilated, and underneath that, his mind is wrecked with PTSD. Karoline dismisses his return, only to be dismissed herself at the gates of her boss’ home. She is not deemed an appropriate wife by the matriarch, so she is left pregnant, fallen, and desperate. 

This all occupies what feels like the set-up of the film. It is a bleak but familiar story—a desperate woman, pregnant and abandoned by society, with nowhere else to turn. An attempt at a self-inflicted abortion is made, an unflinchingly visceral scene of blood, steel and water. Karoline fails to abort, but she is cared for by a woman named Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) and her 7-year-old daughter Erena (Ava Knox Martin). This is when she learns that Dagmar is at the head of a clandestine baby-adoption operation, a welcomed avenue for mothers with no other options. 

The work that Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm put into their characters is incredible and stands at the heart of this film’s success. The nuances of the relationship between Karolina and Dagmar, an eerie mother/daughter dynamic tinged with homoeroticism, drive this film forward. It is the golden thread which guides us through the labyrinth of darkness that is this film, every corner taken revealing a new depth to the horror. Sonne’s performance as increasingly exhausted and traumatised, a shell of the fiery woman we first meet, is stunningly heart-wrenching. On the other hand, Dyrholm’s enigmatic Dagmar imbues the film with a breathless tension that snaps into delirium by the third-act climax. They are not easy characters to pull off, and the two actresses do so stunningly. 

The film may take place in the black and white world of post-war Copenhagen, a soot-filled and cramped landscape that seems distant to modern viewers, but the true violence of this film lies in how relevant it reveals itself to be. The endless cries of unwanted babies, the suffocating despair of powerless women, the incomprehensible venues that all this misery leads to—it’s a reality of our increasingly misogynistic and traditionalist world. 

This is no dark fairytale, it is no Gothic nightmare. The Girl With The Needle may be seeping with horror imagery, but all of its darkness and dread are born of our worst realities. It is hard to swallow this fact as one comes out of the film, but it is forced upon us by one final revelation: the script is based on a true story. Once the weight of this realisation is processed, all that is left is the even more terrible understanding that it is a story bound to be repeated over and over again, a truth so ugly we would rather ignore it in our fight for fundamental rights. And yet it is at our door, lurking within our basest instincts. 

The Girl With The Needle is a hard film to recommend, possessing such an unflinching darkness that it feels like a reckoning with evil. But it is truly an urgent piece of cinema, one that deserves to be watched—if only once.