The Girl with the Needle Review: Softly Devastating

The Girl with the Needle plunges you into a softly devastating nightmare that’s as authentically old-school as it is painfully relevant.

In The Girl with the Needle, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a factory worker in Copenhagen post-World War I. Pregnant, alone, and struggling for money, she becomes a wet nurse for an underground adoption agency led by another woman named Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who helps unwilling mothers by taking their children and finding new homes for them. From there … wWell, I’m hesitant to give anything else away, but let’s just say layers are slowly peeled back until we’re left with something very, very ugly and disturbingly, horrifically dark.

But even before all that, this film is the furthest thing possible from a walk in the park. And as is often the case with movies like this, I need to disclose the very hard-to-discern fact that I am not a woman, nor have I ever been one. I have no firsthand idea what it’s like to be one, how it feels in day-to-day life, or what complex, omnipresent physical and societal challenges may or may not come with being one in this day and age, let alone the early twentieth century in Denmark. But as far as The Girl with the Needle is concerned, it’s gotten across to an overwhelming degree just how raw, unstable, and internally conflicting Karoline’s life is.

You see her working a thankless factory job and how hard she has to scrape just to get some money. You see the emotional toll her pregnancy takes on her, including the fear that she can’t provide for the child and may not even want it once the father is no longer around, yet how the effects are totally out of her control. Sure, there are people here and there who show her some degree of kindness where they can, but not only does that later come at many costs, but the biggest strength of this film is how well it presents its setting as a grungy, filthy environment where all kindness and hope is at its most fragile.

Michał Dymek, through his entirely black-and-white cinematography, bathes every single shot in so many bleak, heavy shadows that the darkness itself feels like an all-powerful character constantly threatening to swallow everything it touches. Every image and sound is so uncomfortably crisp, so clear yet so dirty, capturing the sheer inescapability of every quietly frightening moment of this setting. It’s so old-school in its aesthetics that – I swear I’m not making this up for hyperbole – I genuinely thought at two points, “Wow, this movie was really decades ahead of its time,” only to remember it’s a modern release.

But yeah, The Girl with the Needle is very obviously relevant to certain current-day dilemmas, serving as a literal black mirror to many women’s worst nightmares, as well as a display of the roots from which their modern roadblocks came. There are very few moments where you’re explicitly shown anything resembling abuse or on-the-nose discrimination. But because of its presentation, the film doesn’t need to show it; just like in real life, it’s always hanging right over characters’ heads. Sometimes it’s the product of a sexist system, and sometimes it’s a broader institutional failure. Sometimes it’s Karoline’s own personal desires getting in the way, or it can even be the mere cold lack of mercy that life itself can throw at anyone.

This straightforward approach doesn’t stop The Girl with the Needle from playing with form and genre. In fact, from its opening with women’s faces distorted and molded into abominations in a void of black, to the eerie score by Frederikke Hoffmeier, to many a slow, suspenseful pan, I don’t think you’d be too far off in saying this is a horror film. Especially when the movie plunges into the actual story it’s based on, where secrets are brought to life that are much, much darker than I was ever suspecting. After you’ve been silently worn down for most of the runtime, you’re then bludgeoned and beaten with the absolute worst nightmare that a human being can embody in these circumstances. It’s abhorrent to watch whether you already know the true events or not.

Maybe it’s the fact that I watched this after an exhausting Thanksgiving trip on a very hazy, chilly day, but The Girl with the Needle thoroughly drained me even before its ending. It’s just that effective at fully submerging you into its inky black depths and never letting up for a second. The first movie I can think to compare it to is The Zone of Interest, in that it rarely shows any horrors onscreen but puts you in a state where you always feel them … until it does outright show you unspeakable evils that make for an oh-so delectable cherry on top. I give it a very strong recommendation as one of the best films of the year, provided you can stomach the wave of soft depression.

The Girl with the Needle will be released in US theaters on December 6, 2024 and in U.K. & Irish cinemas on January 10, 2025.