Magnus von Horn has billed his splendid, sombre third feature as a fairy tale for grown-ups. That’s an unlikely pitch for a film loosely inspired by the gruesome deeds of Dagmar Overbye, the Danish serial killer who murdered between nine and 25 children between 1913 and 1920.
Vic Carmen Sonne’s haunted war widow, Karoline, falls far to come under Dagmar’s malign influence. Karoline’s precarious existence is flagged in the opening scene when she – an impoverished seamstress working in a linen factory – is threatened with eviction from her shabby lodgings. She pleads with the factory director (Joachim Fjelstrup) for assistance. The pair embark on a brief affair, a momentary glimmer of hope, before his mother intervenes and her presumed-dead husband returns with horrific injuries – which, we later learn, encompass severe shell shock and nocturnal howling.
An abandoned and pregnant Karoline unsuccessfully attempts an abortion at a local bathhouse, where she encounters Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a friendly woman who operates a sweet shop and a backstreet adoption agency. It’s not a charitable intervention. Dagmar demands payment for placing her baby, and Karoline remains at the sweet shop – trapped by fear and ether – as a wet nurse for the foundlings passing through. It takes some time for her to realise that she is an accomplice to something awful.
Michal Dymek, the film’s cinematographer, and Jagna Dobesz, its production designer, cast history as Stygian gloom. The script, which von Horn wrote with Line Langebek, carefully rifles through contemporaneous grotesquerie. When Karolina seeks out her husband after initially spurning him, he removes his tin mask – a prosthetic like those fashioned by the sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd for what Parisians called “gueules cassées” – at a freak show. The Girl with the Needle finds even greater horror in the doomy fates of fallen women and their children.
Two child stars of School of Rock just got married. How cool is that!
The Girl with the Needle review: Splendid but sombre serial-killer-inspired fairy tale for grown-ups
The Movie Quiz: Who wears the balaclava in Kneecap?
Abbey Theatre gets €9.5m in strategic funding from Arts Council, €1m more than last year
The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.
The Girl with the Needle is in cinemas from Friday, January 10th
