Post-war Denmark. The country might have been neutral during the First World War, but an air of economic instability and a wave of child murders blanket the European country in this macabre black-and-white tale, inspired by the real-life crimes of Danish serial killer Dagmar Overbye, who targeted impoverished mothers to slay their infants.
A haunting and stylish work of fictionalized true crime. The selling point of The Girl with the Needle can be its infamous muse: Dagmar Overbye, a Danish woman who murdered her own infant and many others (the accounts sit between 9 to 25 children) until she got sentenced to death. For director and co-writer Magnus von Horn, the aim isn't to sensationalize Overbye's seven-year reign of terror. Instead, for most of his stylishly gloomy period drama, the focus lies on the fictional heroine Karoline, a down-on-her-luck woman with a missing husband and a troublesome pregnancy. Portraying this working-class Dane with muted emotions and a cold-hearted stare, Vic Carmen Sonne arouses empathy but doesn't exploit Karoline's pain to pity-inducing levels. With a masterful performance and an empathetic exploration of one of Denmark's most notorious crime waves, The Girl with the Needle excels as a work of historical horror. Michał Dymek's heavily saturated monochrome cinematography and Frederikke Hoffmeier's jarring score succeed in building unease and discomfort.
The slow-burning pace and inconsistencies are saved by a tragically relevant premise. Despite its stylistic merits, The Girl with the Needle can be inconsistent towards the second half. While Karoline's backstory and her struggles with men, pregnancy, and abortions are sensitively fleshed out, the killer in question remains enigmatic till the very end. Maybe that was Magnus von Horn's intention, ensuring the spotlight is on the invisible victims and not the headline-making perpetrator. But with a little more character development on Overbye's part, the narrative could have flowed even more seamlessly. Regardless, The Girl with the Needle is a masterful piece of period fiction that asks questions about the autonomy of women's bodies with grim realism. The titular needle is given to Karoline to end the child she carries because there's no man to claim the offspring. In an age of overturning of Roe vs. Wade (and several other anti-abortion laws all over the world), the gruesome surgical methods of the film might not be practiced today. However, the overbearing sense of bodily control is still as universal as ever.
A haunting exploration of bodily autonomy disguised as a serial killer thriller.
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