Film Review: The Girl With The Needle
One of 2024’s best underseen horror films
During my annual frantic marathon of Oscar nominees, I belatedly discovered one of the best horror movies of 2024.
Denmark’s nominee in the Best International Feature category, The Girl with the Needle recalls “Hansel and Gretel” by way of Fritz Lang’s M, with a dash of Tod Browning’s Freaks. Directed by Magnus von Horn, it tells a partly true story in a surreal style, black-and-white cinematography fostering an atmosphere both grim and wondrous.
The protagonist, Karoline, is a seamstress living in Denmark around the end of World War I. An ill-fated affair with a wealthy man leaves her pregnant and jobless; her presumed-dead husband returns at the worst possible time, disfigured and traumatized. Not liking her options, she hands her baby over to Dagmar, a stern shopkeeper who promises to find it a good home. When she returns the next day to find her baby already gone, Karoline offers Dagmar her services as a wetnurse.
The babies Dagmar takes in are not, of course, being adopted by grateful doctors and lawyers. (The character is based on Dagmar Overbye, an early 20th century serial killer who took the lives of an unconfirmed number of infants in her charge).
Dagmar is styled as an archetypical fairy tale witch, operating from the innocuous auspices of a candy shop, enchanting desperate women into feeding her their children. She has a diminutive familiar in the form of Erena, a little girl who one suspects cannot possibly be her daughter. She even mixes potions, of a sort; she soothes whatever conscience she has with ether, and soon has Karoline hooked as well.
Karoline’s role in this story is far more inscrutable, her motivations so murky you suspect even she doesn’t know what they are. She remains in Dagmar’s employ out of opportunism and longing, replacing her lost daughter with other abandoned children. There’s a sexual element to her relationship with Dagmar (I’ll avoid the word “romantic,” as it’s about as loving as that of a vampire to its thrall). I found myself wondering if the women are supposed to be two-of-a-kind, if the cold, embittered Karoline is disillusioned enough to embrace her mentor’s sociopathic utilitarianism.
The foil to this dynamic is Karoline’s estranged husband Peter, a veteran mutilated by a bomb blast. She finds him performing in a freak show, where a ghoulish carnival barker challenges volunteers to dip their fingers into his empty eye socket. But haunted as Peter is, he remains patient and gentle. The film’s most touching moment sees Peter lovingly cradling the newborn he knows is not his, removing his CLAY mask to kiss its forehead. The baby looks at his face and keeps on cooing.
There’s a lot of cruelty on parade in The Girl with The Needle, from cold-blooded child murder to everyday acts of abuse, abandonment, and indifference. Karoline has internalized this callousness, and Dagmar has embraced it. Towards the end, the camera cuts from Dagmar’s murder trial to the orphanage, an assembly line of cradles guarded by dispassionate nurses. But the film itself is not so cynical about human nature - there are moments of decency scattered throughout.
Karoline’s decision to act as a wetnurse (even after she’s told how to stop her lactation) recalls Shakespeare’s image of “the milk of human kindness,” inverting Lady MacBeth’s plea for the spirits to “Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall,” lest compassion thwart her ambitions.
The final scene shows Karoline adopting Dagmar’s young “daughter,” who I couldn’t help but see as a quintessential creepy horror movie kid (if not Damien from The Omen, at least Rhoda from The Bad Seed). I had to talk myself out of that reaction – remind myself that this one-time witch’s familiar is only a child – and a victim herself.
If The Girl with the Needle is a “fairy tale,” as some critics have called it, it’s one that deconstructs itself, forces you back to the lens of reality. It’s less interested in a storybook view of good and evil than in humanity’s capacity for decency – even when indifference would be easier. Real life is not the territory of diabolical witches and innocent maidens, whose vices and virtues are inherent and immutable, but of fallible human beings with agency, capable of choosing mercy.
Review by Madison McSweeney
Twitter: @MMcSw13
Instagram: madison.mcsweeney13
