Nowadays we are chest-deep in outraged explorations of historical misogyny, in fiction, film, and TV, revisiting everything from the Salem witch hunts to suffragettes to mid-century glass-ceiling battles to “Golden Age” porn. You can hardly be blamed for thinking you know the drumroll of women’s past travails pretty well, which enables a scalding, fascinated jolt when you hear the old rhythm played in a startlingly new and specific way. I felt it this year with Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s 18th-century patriarchal-bear-trap parable The Devil’s Bath, and now again with the new Danish film The Girl with the Needle. It’s a black marble of a movie, unforgiving and cold-eyed and chillingly constructed, with the bolero-like sense of inevitable doom that must’ve been familiar, as a social condition, to too many pre-contemporary women to count.
The sociopolitical iron maiden tightening around Karoline is crystal clear but never expressly addressed — instead, it’s the details that scream.
Co-written by director Magnus von Horn and Line Langebek, the film is loosely based on a real fin de siècle serial killer case — but it’s best not to know the details of that business too soon, as you are immediately trapped with Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a wary single woman evicted suddenly onto the street in a pitiless WWI-era Copenhagen. A sweatshop seamstress with no options, she cannot get a widow’s pension because her war-vanished husband has not turned up dead; her next flat is a leaky slum. You might well be expecting Karoline to evolve, by mounting and monstrous circumstance, to become the murderess in question, but the film is craftier than that, and von Horn is in no hurry. Karoline instead ends up catching the eye of her affluent employer (Joachim Fjelstrup), who woos her, knocks her up, promises marriage, and then, in due course, brings her to the family manse, where the matriarch of the family has her submit to a uterine examination and where Karoline’s troubles really begin.
The sociopolitical iron maiden tightening around Karoline is crystal clear but never expressly addressed — instead, it’s the details that scream, from the public baths where von Horn’s heroine tries to abort her baby with a terrifyingly huge sewing needle to the Diane Arbus–like images of poverty and deformity (her husband, played by Besir Zeciri, does reappear, behind a ghostly strap-on face mask hiding his wartorn face). Photographed by Michal Dymek in black and white so dark it’s a vision of Industrial Europe pickled in India ink, the movie is immersive in inverse proportion to our intimacy with Karoline, who, as Sonne plays her, is a weary, not-very-bright thing, half-lidded and watchful, a leaf blown around by casual human desires. After she finally gives birth — at her new shit job, on a pile of potatoes — Karoline reaches out to the woman who rescued her in the baths: Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a robust and maternal older woman who, it turns out, has a side hustle selling unwanted babies.
The movie is more than halfway through when Karoline, still lactating, though her child is long gone, takes up work in Dagmar’s candy shop, assisting in the care and secret passage of infants and joining the savvier woman in addictive blasts of ether. This criminal enterprise is also fraught with its own risks and calamities; as the tensions mount we might well forget about the murders that are said to take place — until they do. (Danish criminophiles won’t have forgotten.) Von Horn’s narrative gearwork has a way of evolving, turning on multiple axes; every twist and grind feels organic to the characters but also to the dire portrait of a society in which most women were tools and vessels, useful in the short term but disposable. As in The Devil’s Bath — a very different sister-movie — von Horn’s film (his third) implicitly reflects on how reproductive biology itself had been socially weaponized, cornering women into subservience and squalor. That sounds didactic and abstract, but The Girl with the Needle is nothing if not hypnotically textural and utterly convincing. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.