A desperate young pregnant woman takes the role of a wet-nurse for a
sinister underground adoption agency.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Magnus von Horn
Starring: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Joachim Fjelstrup, Tessa Hoder, Avo Knox Martin
Writer/director Magnus von Horn follows
The Here After
and
Sweat
with another intense character study in period drama
The Girl with the Needle. This one is loosely inspired by the real life Danish serial killer
Dagmar Overbye, but von Horn's true inspiration seems to come from the
melodramas of the silent era and perhaps from Richard Fleischer's
10 Rillington Place, with which it shares several thematic elements. Like the recent films
Woman of the Hour,
The Man in the White Van
and
He Went That Way, it's a movie about a serial killer that is centred not on the killer
but on someone unfortunate enough to find themselves in their orbit.
That someone is the fictionalised Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), who
believes herself widowed at the end of World War One when her husband
fails to return home. Karoline's life takes a series of bad turns, leading
to her botching an attempt at performing a self-abortion in a public bath
house. It's here that she encounters Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who
intervenes before Karoline can do irreparable damage to herself. Dagmar
informs Karoline that she runs a service that takes unwanted infants and
places them in "good homes," for a fee of course. When Karoline gives
birth, she takes her baby to Dagmar, who takes pity on Karoline and offers
her the dual job of acting as a wet-nurse for the infants she takes in
while working in her sweet shop. Ironically, tending to Dagmar's babies
brings out the very maternal instincts Karoline previously sought to
suppress. But Karoline soon comes to realise that Dagmar's services aren't
as advertised, and that the children are far from being housed with
"doctors and lawyers," as Dagmar claims.
Von Horn's film follows a narrative path tread by many melodramas of the
silent and early talkie eras, that of a protagonist, usually a woman,
seeking a way out of awful circumstances only to dig a greater hole for
herself, from which she struggles to claw her way out by the end. Like the
gangster's moll Sonne portrayed so memorably in Isabella Eklöf's
masterful
Holiday, Karoline finds herself caught in a hellish circumstance largely as a
result of her own ambition. Far from some angelic figure we can easily
sympathise with, Karoline is ruthless and manipulative, but the film makes
it so clear that she believes this is the only way she can survive in the
Darwinian landscape of post-war Copenhagen that we empathise with her
actions, even if we recognise them as cruel. Karoline is a woman of few
words (I can't distinguish Danish accents but I suspect much of her
silence is rooted in Karoline's self-consciousness regarding her lowly
class status) and so Sonne's performance often recalls that of a silent
star, her big expressive eyes betraying her hopes, fears and
motivations.
The Girl with the Needle makes it clear that post-war
Denmark is no country for young women, but it doesn't strive for easy
feminist points by lazily putting moustache-twirling men in villainous
positions. The most sympathetic character in the entire drama is
Karoline's husband Peter (Besir Zeciri), who eventually returns
home from the war with half his face missing, concealed under a mask that
gives him the appearance of the Phantom of the Opera. Unlike the striving
Karoline, Peter has accepted his circumstances, taking an exploitative job
in a circus "freak" show. In a film packed with displays of humanity at
its worst, Karoline's cruel dismissal of Peter might be the most difficult
to watch, not just for the pain we feel for Peter but as it marks the
point where we realise Karoline has lost her moral compass, making her
easy prey for someone like Dagmar.
Like the aforementioned 10 Rillington Place, The Girl with the Needle highlights how a society
shifting through the rubble of a war allows evil to go unnoticed. Like
Richard Attenborough's John Christie, Dagmar presents herself as a kindly
parental figure at a time when kindness is difficult to come by, and both
killers take advantage of young women desperate to avoid bringing a child
into a world that has so recently demonstrated the full extent of its
hostility. Early on, von Horn establishes the indifference of the citizens
of Copenhagen when Karoline has sex with Jorgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), the owner of the clothing factory where she toils as a seamstress,
down an alleyway, their moans clearly audible to passersby on the nearby
street, yet nobody pays any heed. Later we see Dagmar commit a shocking
deed in a similar alley as an oblivious public similarly passes by.
Using her charms, Karoline manipulates Jorgen into agreeing to become her
husband, only for her to find herself on the street when Jorgen's Baroness
mother refuses to sanction any such marriage. Up to that point Jorgen had
been a sympathetic figure, but in his refusal to stand up to his mother he
becomes an instant villain. Conversely, Peter is the one character who has
truly stood up to evil, and though he's been left physically and mentally
scarred in doing so, we get the impression that he's the only figure in
von Horn's film who can boast a clean conscience.
The Girl with the Needle suggests that evil triumphs when
good people do nothing, but it also makes starkly clear the personal cost
of taking moral action. By the end of the film Karoline's body and mind
are severely damaged, but we're more concerned with how she can repair her
conscience and live with the atrocities she has witnessed.
The Girl with the Needle is in
US cinemas from December 6th and UK/ROI cinemas from January 10th.
