‘The Girl With the Needle’ review: Women face the unthinkable

Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is utterly alone in Copenhagen. She assumed her husband, Peter, died in the Great War until he turned up unannounced and horrifically disfigured — she turned him away. No longer able to afford their apartment, she has been renting a shabby, leaking room from a strict landlady. Karoline is pregnant, thanks to a momentary pursuit of pleasure, and that predicament has resulted in the loss of her job at a textile factory. And so, she feels her only choice is to spirit a knitting needle into a public bathhouse, to attempt to self-inflict as much damage as possible to rid herself of this problem.

She is alone, until she is not. A strong hand pulls her out of the water, presses a towel to the bleeding. The clear eyes of Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) find hers. She has instructions: Go to the doctor if the bleeding doesn’t stop. She’ll take the baby when it’s born, and find it a nice foster family, doctors and lawyers, good people. Bring money. As Dagmar and her young daughter Erena (Avo Knox Martin) walk Karoline home, she presses a bag of candy from her shop into the young woman’s hand. It’s one of the only acts of kindness we see Karoline receive. She asks Dagmar why she’s helping her. “Who else would?” Dagmar answers.

“The Girl With the Needle,” Denmark’s official submission for the international feature Oscar, is directed and co-written by the Swedish Polish filmmaker Magnus von Horn. It doesn’t announce itself as such, but it is a film about one of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers, Dagmar Overbye, a child caretaker convicted in 1921 for murdering nine babies (she may have killed up to 25). Women brought the victims to her, babies born out of wedlock, perhaps one too many for a household or the mother too young. Dagmar was presented with a problem and she took care of it, in the cruelest of ways.

For Von Horn and his Danish co-writer Line Langebek, what’s important about Dagmar’s story isn’t Dagmar herself, but the social context that birthed her heinous crimes and the hypothetical women who might have found themselves in Dagmar’s dark embrace, like Karoline.

The world presented by “The Girl With the Needle” is a newly industrialized, postwar Denmark that is not kind to many — workers, veterans, even wealthy aristocrats trapped in gilded cages, unwilling to risk money or status for happiness. But it is harshest on women and babies, who bear the brunt of a society built on inequality, women lacking access to options for anything, really: jobs, resources, healthcare, childcare.

The stark reality of a period piece like “The Girl With the Needle” is that it may show us something terrible from a century ago, and also remind us that things are not so different in our modern world. Von Horn synthesizes the past and present not only in subject matter, but in the film’s visual and sonic style, creating an uncanny kind of then and now.

Polish cinematographer Michal Dymek (“EO,” “A Real Pain”) captures the Dickensian squalor of cobblestone streets, smoke-belching factories, rancid rental rooms, rickety staircases and grotesque freak-show circuses in high-contrast black-and-white cinematography that calls to mind vintage photography and German Expressionism. (At times, the back-lighted closeups almost resemble tintypes.)

It’s a look that speaks to the art and cinema movements from that era, but it feels modern too, which is drawn out via the score by Frederikke Hoffmeier, a Danish experimental noise musician who performs under the stage name Puce Mary. Her compositions combine droning dissonance, piano and strings to create a moody and evocative electronic ambient score that lends a contemporary flavor. The film is a harrowing and eerie horror fairy tale from another time, even as it feels startlingly fresh and always unpredictable.

Part of that unpredictability is predicated on Sonne’s performance, which errs on the wild side. You never know how she’s going to react and while her large eyes are often sullen and sad, her expression unreadable, Dyrholm’s are wide and bright, verging on the edge of mania. Dyrholm is known as the “Meryl Streep of Denmark,” and she delivers a fearless performance, at once sympathetic to Dagmar’s past and unflinching about her crimes, making her a character who is at once terrifying and comprehensible. Dagmar’s world is an evil, ether-drenched whirlpool that sucks Karoline further and further down into darkness and murder.

“The Girl With the Needle” makes for a thematic trio with two other international features this year: “The Devil’s Bath” from Austria and Italy’s “Vermiglio,” period pieces about women suffering under oppressive patriarchy, where there’s no room for error, particularly when it comes to pregnancy. All three films offer a grimly transporting experience to a distant time and place, with an emotional and social immediacy that resonates deeply in the present. Von Horn wants to show us that a world divided is the cruelest of all, teeming with the kind of inequality that can produce a “monster” like Dagmar.