The Girl with the Needle

dir. Magnus von Horn · 2024

Snapshot

A post-WWI Copenhagen rendered in oppressive charcoal and ash. A young factory worker, Karoline, loses her job, discovers she is pregnant, and drifts into the orbit of Dagmar — a warmly menacing confectioner who doubles as an underground adoption broker. The bond between them hardens into complicity, then horror. Magnus von Horn's third feature is a slow-build fable of female desperation that refuses pastoral redemption: its Copenhagen is a city of poverty wages, vanished husbands, and infants no one can afford to keep. Shot in high-contrast black and white, the film fuses social-realist subject matter with an expressionist visual grammar, arriving at something that feels simultaneously archaic and viscerally contemporary — a period film whose emotional logic belongs entirely to the present.

Industry & production

The Girl with the Needle (Danish: Pigen med nålen) is a Danish-Polish co-production, its binational structure reflecting the continuing partnership between Nordic and Central European film industries and, more specifically, von Horn's long personal connection to Polish cinema culture. The film is rooted in documented history: Dagmar Overbye, a real Copenhagen woman, was arrested in 1920 and convicted in 1921 of murdering at least nine infants entrusted to her care through what amounted to a baby-farming operation. She was sentenced to death, the sentence subsequently commuted to life imprisonment; she died in prison in 1929. The Overbye case was a national scandal in Denmark and remains one of the country's most notorious criminal episodes, generating significant newspaper coverage at the time and occasional revisitation in Danish cultural memory. Von Horn and screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen use the case as historical scaffolding while constructing a largely fictional protagonist — Karoline — whose perspective the film inhabits, positioning Dagmar as an ambiguous figure encountered from the outside rather than a psychologized protagonist.

The production secured Danish Film Institute support, and the involvement of Nordisk Film production infrastructure gave it the institutional legitimacy to attract the cast of established Danish actors alongside newcomers. Denmark submitted the film as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 97th Academy Awards (ceremony 2025). The project's subject matter — infanticide, poverty, the exploitation of desperate women by a system of both industrial capitalism and informal criminal enterprise — sits squarely within the kind of socially engaged, historically grounded material that Danish public film funding has consistently supported across decades.

Technology

The film is shot on digital, rendered to approximate the tonal range and grain structure of high-contrast black-and-white photochemical stock. The palette achieves deep, near-crushed blacks and a narrow mid-range that compresses interior space and isolates figures against darkness. Cinematographer Michał Dymek, who had collaborated with von Horn on Sweat (2020), made choices consistent with a deliberate archaism — an Academy-adjacent aspect ratio narrows the frame, reinforcing the suffocating geography of the film's tenements and back-rooms and rhyming with the shape of classical silent-era images. The period setting and the expressionist visual project together license a refusal of the widescreen grammar that contemporary prestige cinema largely defaults to. The result is a film that inhabits a technology deliberately not-quite-present, situating itself in a productive historical blur between the silent era it invokes and the digital present it was made in.

Technique

Cinematography

Dymek's work here is among the most stylized European cinematography of 2024. Light sources are motivated but barely — a gas lamp, a window, a candle — and illumination routinely fails to reach the corners of rooms, leaving figures partly consumed by shadow in the manner of Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) or the later German expressionist productions. Exterior Copenhagen is shot with an emphasis on industrial fog and wet cobblestones that reflect available light back upward, giving the city a phosphorescent, slightly unreal quality. Close-ups of faces are lit to emphasize texture — the aging of Dagmar's skin, the rawness of Karoline's — in ways that recall both the Bressonian effacement of glamour and the German silent tradition's fascination with the expressive surface of the human face. Camera movement is largely restrained; von Horn and Dymek prefer held compositions that force attention onto performance within the frame rather than kinetic coverage.

Editing

The editing maintains deliberate pacing that operates against conventional thriller momentum. Sequences that might be accelerated for dramatic pay-off in genre filmmaking are allowed to breathe and expand, particularly in the film's middle act as Karoline insinuates herself into Dagmar's operation. The intercutting between the warmth of the candy shop and the cold interiors where infants are processed creates mounting dread through juxtaposition rather than revelation. The editing grammar is closer to the European art cinema tradition — Haneke, Östlund, or the Danish Dogme adjacent — than to conventional period thriller cutting.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The production design refuses picturesque period nostalgia. The Copenhagen of the film is built of cramped institutional spaces, peeling plaster, raw wood, and the smell of industry — conveyed through texture and visual information even where smell cannot reach. Staging consistently uses depth of field to place figures in murky backgrounds while the foreground remains sharp, creating spatial unease. Dagmar's candy shop is the film's most theatrically constructed space: its warmth and sweetness are coded explicitly as seduction, a performance of domesticity that covers commercial horror. Von Horn borrows from the theatrical tradition of the uncanny domestic — the space that should be safe and is not — familiar from Ibsen through Lynch.

Sound

The sound design grounds the film in industrial ambience: factory machinery, street noise, rain against windows. Where score intrudes, it does so as texture rather than emotional instruction, consistent with the broader tendency of contemporary European art cinema to use music sparingly and abstractly. The score reportedly draws on experimental and noise-adjacent sources, though the detailed compositional record in available English-language criticism is thin; specific claims about the score's composition should be treated with caution.

Performance

Vic Carmen Sonne carries the film with a physical commitment that largely eschews conventional expressiveness in favor of exhausted endurance — a Bressonian body under pressure. Trine Dyrholm as Dagmar performs across a register that keeps her motives permanently suspended: warmth, predation, genuine attachment, and instrumental calculation coexist without resolution, which is the film's central moral achievement. Dyrholm is one of Scandinavia's most decorated screen actors (In a Better World, 2010; The Commune, 2016) and the performance here consolidates her command of a specific mode — the formidable woman whose damage is structural rather than merely biographical. The supporting cast, largely non-anglophone Danish and Polish actors, maintains the film's tonal consistency.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film operates in the mode of the slow-burn social fable. Its narrative arc follows the classical structure of the descent story — innocence compromised by necessity, complicity deepened by need, the impossibility of clean exit — but complicates it by distributing moral agency unevenly. Karoline is not innocent when we meet her; survival has already made her pragmatic. Dagmar is not simply monstrous; she offers real shelter to women the state has abandoned. The film's horror derives from the logic of the system rather than the psychology of a killer, which aligns it with a tradition of European political cinema that locates evil in economic structure rather than individual depravity. The narrative climax is handled with severe restraint — the film does not provide the catharsis of confrontation that genre conventions would license, which is both its distinction and, for some audiences, its frustration.

Genre & cycle

The Girl with the Needle belongs to a recognizable cycle of contemporary European historical horror-adjacent films — works like Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018), Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021), and Men (Alex Garland, 2022) — that use extreme or supernatural event structures to address contemporary anxieties about gender, body, and economic precarity. Von Horn's film is the most historically grounded of these, and the least reliant on generic supernatural machinery. Its true genre ancestor is the German Expressionist social drama and the Nordic silent tradition — films like Dreyer's Master of the House (1925) and Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921), which mapped domestic and economic violence onto a visual language of shadow and enclosure. The film also participates in a recent wave of period films centered on women's criminality under patriarchal constraint — a cycle that includes Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019), The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018), and older reference points like Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994).

Authorship & method

Magnus von Horn (b. 1983, Sweden) trained at the Polish National Film School in Łódź (commonly called the Filmówka) — the institution that produced Kieślowski, Polański, Wajda, and Zanussi, and whose pedagogical tradition emphasizes precise visual grammar and moral seriousness in equal measure. His Polish education is not incidental to his filmography: it gives him a set of aesthetic references — the Eastern European art cinema of the 1960s–1980s, the Polish school of poster art and design, the Catholic-inflected imagery of guilt and sacrifice — that sit alongside Scandinavian social realism rather than being reducible to it. His debut feature The Here After (Efterskalv, 2015) addressed reintegration after youth violence; Sweat (2020) examined social-media celebrity and isolation. Both established a consistent method: close attention to bodies under social pressure, restrained mise-en-scène, distrust of emotional resolution.

Michał Dymek (cinematographer) is a Polish DP whose career has run parallel to the resurgence of Polish art cinema. His work on Jan Komasa's Corpus Christi (2019) — Poland's Oscar submission that year — established his international profile. The collaborative relationship with von Horn across Sweat and The Girl with the Needle has produced a distinctive shared visual language: desaturated (or here, fully monochrome) imagery, motivated but insufficient lighting, an emphasis on the materiality of the photographed world.

Line Langebek Knudsen (screenwriter) grounds the project in Danish historical and cultural specificity, giving the collaboration its documentary tether. The division of labor — between von Horn's visually and formally ambitious direction and Knudsen's culturally embedded writing — is a productive tension the film holds without resolving.

Movement / national cinema

The film represents a strand of Scandinavian cinema that has never fully belonged to any single national tradition: von Horn is Swedish, trained Polish, working in Denmark, with Polish co-production money. This transnational character is typical of contemporary Nordic co-productions, facilitated by Eurimages and bilateral agreements, but von Horn's case is distinctive in the depth of his Polish formation. Danish cinema provides the historical subject and the institutional support; the Polish film school provides the aesthetic vocabulary; Swedish identity provides a certain external observer's distance from the Danish material. The result is a film that is simultaneously inside and outside the national cinema it depicts — a useful estrangement that prevents heritage-mode nostalgia.

Era / period

Post-WWI Copenhagen (approximately 1918–1920) is the immediate setting, but the film uses this era emblematically. The period is one of industrial modernization with residual premodern poverty, of new political formations (labor movements, women's suffrage debates across Europe) that have not yet translated into material change for women at the bottom of the economy. The film is alert to the specific texture of this historical moment — the factory floor, the housing stock, the informal economies — without allowing period detail to become decorative. The Dagmar Overbye case exists within a broader early-twentieth-century European history of baby farming and infant mortality under conditions of poverty and illegitimacy stigma, a history that connects to similar cases in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere in the same decades.

Themes

The film's primary concerns are the economics of unwanted life; female solidarity as both genuine and predatory; the state's abandonment of poor women as the precondition for private exploitation; and the moral degradation that survival can require. It thinks carefully about the difference between victimhood and agency — Karoline and Dagmar are both victims of a system and actors within it — and refuses the sentimental resolution by which victims are redeemed through suffering. Maternal instinct is treated with particular complexity: neither simply present nor simply absent in either protagonist, it operates as a site of contestation rather than a stable moral anchor. The film's candy-shop imagery condenses the central irony with precision: sweetness and death are commercially and spatially conjoined, which is also the film's structural method — beauty and horror share a cinematographic grammar.

Reception, canon & influence

The Girl with the Needle premiered at the Cannes Film Festival 2024 to strong critical response. Reviewers consistently noted its visual rigor and the power of Dyrholm's performance; the film's refusal of genre catharsis divided opinion, with some critics finding the austerity withholding and others identifying it as the film's central ethical commitment. The Denmark Oscar submission generated attention in international trade and awards press. Trine Dyrholm received particular recognition for the role across European critics' circles.

Backward influence — the film draws explicitly on Carl Theodor Dreyer's visual legacy (Vampyr, Ordet), on German Expressionism broadly (the chiaroscuro, the institutional spaces of dread), on the Nordic silent tradition of Sjöström and Stiller, and on the Eastern European art cinema traditions absorbed through von Horn's Łódź formation. More recent influences include the Danish-rooted tradition of uncompromising social realism (Vinterberg, the Dogme 95 ethos, though the film formally departs from Dogme's naturalism), and the contemporary European body-horror strand.

Forward influence — it is too early to map The Girl with the Needle's downstream effect on filmmaking with confidence; the historical record on this point is genuinely thin, as is routine for films within a year or two of release. What can be noted is its likely contribution to ongoing critical conversations about historical films centered on women's violence, about the aesthetics of Northern European genre-adjacent art cinema, and about co-production as a model for transnational authorship. Von Horn's career trajectory — formally ambitious, morally serious, institutionally well-supported — suggests that this film will be revisited as a significant marker in the Scandinavian-Central European art cinema of the mid-2020s.