Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.
I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat, but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”
The Girl With the Needle is a grippingly acted arthouse-exploitation picture with a truly hellish theme, though I wondered about Van Horn’s decision to split the dramatic focus between the actual serial killer and an elaborately backstoried fictional woman (the “girl with the needle”) who is one of her victim-clients and with whom she has a kind of complicit emotional relationship. It is a bold invention, but it slightly lessens the dramatic presence and impact of the killer, and perhaps fallaciously abolishes her essential loneliness.
The always excellent Vic Carmen Sonne, from Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland and Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday, plays Karoline, a poverty-stricken young woman whose husband is evidently missing, believed killed in action (a slightly uncomfortable plot contrivance, as elsewhere von Horn’s script has to concede that Denmark was neutral). She has a passionate affair with the wealthy owner of the textile mill where she is employed, who offers to marry her once she gets pregnant. But his fierce mother forbids the match and Karoline’s husband actually returns after Armistice Day, with a mask to cover the terrible facial injuries that mean the only work he can get is as a circus freak. In her desperation, Karoline attempts her termination in a bath-house, and this is where she meets the legendary (and real) Dagmar Overbye, played by the charismatic Trine Dyrholm, a shopkeeper who tells Karoline she can get babies adopted, for a fee. But these babies are not getting adopted.
There are nauseating but very plausible touches. Dagmar is addicted to ether, to lessen the horror and despair; she also has a young child in the house (evidently a former baby that she couldn’t bear to have “adopted”) that Karoline is forced to breastfeed. A different treatment of the character might have looked in more detail at her youth and upbringing, her own theoretical experience of cruelty, poverty and abuse, and the way in which she gradually got into her gruesome vocation. Von Horn has outsourced these ideas to his younger, fictional-composite Karoline; it’s a perfectly workable idea, but it means Dyrholm has less to work with. Yet there’s no doubting the shiver of pure fear that runs through this movie from beginning to end.