Director: Magnus van Horn
Stars: Vic Carmen Sonne, Besir Zeciri, Trine Dyrholm
With his previous feature Sweat, Mangus van Horn showed himself one of the most adept at cataloguing and criticising our present obsession with social media, deconstructing the life of an influencer in intense, magnetic detail. For his follow-up it would appear than van Horn is eager to display his versatility, taking us back to post-WWI Copenhagen for a bleak, monochromatic vision of industrial squalor as her charts the dour dramas that befall Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) when she is impregnated and then discarded by her boss at a textiles factory.
The decision to film in black and white harks back evocatively to an era we know in such terms. van Horn’s references points are broader, however. He starkly mirrors the Lumière Brothers’ landmark 1895 documentary short Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory with one of Karoline’s early rendezvous with her wealthy employer. And, when her presumed-dead husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) returns from the front with a mask covering his severely disfigured face, van Horn places him tragically in a freakshow ten-in-one. With its industrial trappings flanking such a setting, The Girl with the Needle can’t help but conjure up David Lynch’s treatment of The Elephant Man. This is no homage, however. These are touchstones on a path to something more jarring and politically itchy.
Karoline’s plight is perpetual, evolving from circumstance to circumstance. Abandoned by the father of her unborn child she resorts, at her most desperate, to a gallingly public auto-abortion at a swimming baths, before being rescued by the doting owner of a foster home, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who convinces Karoline to proceed with the pregnancy but to give up the child.
As removed from Sweat as The Girl with the Needle might seem, the connecting thread is van Horn’s interest into the lives of women whose private lives spill out into the public. That the attempted abortion in such a social setting only mirrors the manner in which Karoline’s baby is conceived, while her (second, and more intimate) reunion with Peter takes place on stage in a circus tent before an audience of reeling spectators. Her business can’t seem to help but tumble messily into public spaces, yet one senses that the intention here is to spotlight ‘the unseen woman’; perpetual victim of circumstance ignored by society throughout patriarchal history. She is hidden in plain sight. Disregarding her becomes a complicit choice. Rather than revel in his women’s pain, van Horn seems provoked by it. His sharing is a kind of outrage.
Still, The Girl with the Needle is rather unrelentingly bleak. Dagmar’s maternal presence at least provides an olive branch of warmth and kindness, but the film maintains an underlying tension that any status quo will be ruptured without warning. This is amply aided by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s restless and unnerving score. With so many terrible events to cram in to two hours, there’s a sense that The Girl with the Needle is in a morbid rush. That we’re rarely embedded in any given situation for very long. This challenges the notion that it’s much more than a litany of suffrage.
The cruelty of prejudice hangs heavy over the picture as does the pressingly pertinent normalisation of heinous, evil acts. All of which is reflected in the gloomily overcast skies that van Horn hangs over 1920s Copenhagen. The city is almost a fantasia of the industrial gothic. Jumping back in time a century he sees just as many miniature tragedies as one might find in the present. Indeed, the setting – between two world wars – is a stark reminder that history may well be repeating itself all around us. It inspires a helpless, disquieting feeling. While well acted and technically impressive, the spectre of such pessimism haunts the picture so thoroughly that one might not readily imagine revisiting this one for kicks, but there’s plenty to admire in van Horn’s cruelly realised indictment of our nature.
The Lost Highway Hotel 