The Girl With The Needle

Today, in a world which, for all the material comforts it offers to many, is familiar with a landscape of endless traumas, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the full psychic impact of the First World War. It was not just that destruction on that scale had not been seen before; it had not, with the exception of a few grim prophets like HG Wells, been imagined before. When the fighting stopped, society was left reeling, without even the direction that military imperatives had brought. Damaged people were everywhere; family structures that had endured for generations were shattered; and with economies in ruin, it was difficult simply to survive day to day. It is, then, no surprise that some of the individual solutions people found for themselves were equally bleak.

Loosely based on a true story, Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With The Needle is Denmark’s submission for the 2025 Oscars. Its title might be taken to refer to the sewing work that heroine Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) undertakes to make ends meet, but to any woman of that period (and, one fears, to an increasing number in the US today), it has an obvious alternative meaning. Karoline has lost her husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) – unaware if he’s living or dead, she is trapped in a netherworld, unable to get state support or to move on with her life. She seeks solace in the arms of her boss, Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), and for a while there is passion that blots out the horrors to be seen every day on Copenhagen’s filthy streets, but in due course she will find herself pregnant and alone, spending her last krone on a hot bath and preparing to do what needs to be done.

What if there were another way? Aren’t there families out there which would love to raise the children others can’t cope with or can’t afford? This is what Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) tells her upon finding her in the bath-house, recognising the meaning of the cries she can’t suppress. Dagmar runs a sweet shop, full of jars that promise escape from the grim world around them, dazzling young visitors; but behind the scenes she has another business, taking in newborn babies which, for a fee, she promises to place with loving families. Unable to make good on her own fee and struggling with maternal longings for which she has no outlet after giving up her child, Karoline secures work there, as a wet nurse, supporting the infants until they move on. With Dagmar and young Erena (Ava Knox Martin), a girl who sometimes seems more like Dagmar’s doll than her offspring, she finds, for a while something like family, but there is little warmth here that is not built upon illusion.

Perhaps that’s the point. Illusions are everywhere in this film. When we find Peter, he is wearing a mask to conceal a ruined face; he ekes out a living as circus freak, surrounded by people whose trade is in pretending to be something they’re not, in distracting weary people from reality. Karoline is at her happiest when letting herself believe that Jørgen will marry her. Jørgen’s family cling to 19th century notions of what it means to be civilised which can do nothing but breed sorrow in this brave new world. Dagmar, perhaps the only person willing to face it all head on, believes that people need their illusions in order to survive. indeed, perhaps that’s how civilisation will be rebuilt. She offers hope in a hopeless place, but there is an awful price.

Shot in black and white with plentiful shades of grey, The Girl With The Needle has about it something of the darkness of European films of that era, such as the early work of Fritz Lang. It is not a place for heroes, with Karoline herself engaging in acts of cruelty, perhaps in an effort to repair her own tortured self-image. Von Horn observes but does not judge. Still, with the aid of a superb cast, he finds flickers of humanity in all his characters. Can they see it in one another? If so, does that make it better, or worse?