In the sequel she takes on the girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Danish: Pigen med nålen
dir: Magnus von Horn
2024
Grim. Things are grim up north. Or at least they were 100 years ago in Copenhagen.
This film… so grim, and black & white, which somehow makes everything grimmer.
Okay, so there’s wonderful cinematography, but what about the story of a girl with the needle?
Well, this is one of the films from last year that I remember watching and thinking “this would have been one of the absolute worst first date movies to watch with anyone…”
Or if someone wanted to take their pregnant partner out for dinner and a movie…
It’s not a horror film, as a drama based on a truly fucked up “true” story, but it sometimes/often feels like one. It starts during the first World War, but mostly it’s about depicting a world and a time where poor women had fuck-all options, safety, support and could only expect things to get worse whenever things got bad.
You know, as opposed to now…
At a time when we can order food to be delivered to us at any time of the day or night (and where the gig economy delivery driver is paid a few cents for that delivery), or when we can get knockoffs of designer clothing sent to us that’s cheaper than the cost of the postage, it might be hard to imagine a time of crushing poverty for the majority of the population.
I know nothing of the place depicted or the time. I know that from costuming choices and the fact that people are doing their filthy business into buckets, and that women have practically no rights and no autonomy, bodily or otherwise, except in the shadows, that it is some unenlightened time. So to me this doesn’t look that different from Dickensian / Victorian England.
But this is set just at the end of the Great War, so however grim it looks it’s not the time of Jack the Ripper, populations still dying from easily treatable diseases and people eating eel pie voluntarily. There were cars and such. Telephones existed. I don’t know if two minute noodles existed yet, but it’s not the Middle Ages, despite the barbarous treatment of women.
Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is… like a figure in a black comedy that’s meant to stand in for The Book of Job. Whatever bad thing can happen to her, does happen to her, with the relentlessness of a downbeat country and western song. Every single thing in society is set against her, and it’s all neatly and inexorably constructed to get her to her lowest point possible, in order for her to fall under the spell of Dagmar Overby (Trine Dyrholm). And while I say it’s almost comical how unfairly everything is stacked up against her, for countless women of her era, and countless women from humanity’s dismal start up til now, its hopeful dismal end, it’s the reality of their circumstances, and not funny at all.
A poor woman to start with, she at least has a job as a seamstress. Her husband went off to war and is presumed dead. She cannot afford her accommodations, a single room, and so her landlord kicks her out.
Where she was didn’t look that flash, but where she ends up has no bathroom, hence the bucket reference earlier, is an attic room, and there’s a hole in the roof, letting in rain and snow.
Nice. At work, you’d think it’d be a net positive that your boss likes you, but her boss likes her a bit too much, and knocks her up against a wall, which I wouldn’t have thought was a path to success, but Karoline is glowing. She thinks this is her ticket to freedom and having maids at her beck and call.
When she visits a woman that she thinks is going to be her mother-in-law, I would say that what transpires would be a surprise, in terms of how awfully she is disabused of her notions of future family and prosperity, but it didn’t come as a surprise, because I have watched movies and read books.
The movie has to get her to her lowest point, so that she is essentially forced to become the girl with the needle, whose purpose is, the needle, that is, to induce an abortion.
This is a gruesome film, that does shy away from extreme depictions of what it implies, but what it implies is awful enough.
You might sense that I am indulging in digression after digression, mostly because of how harrowing the subject matter of this flick is, and how little I want to talk about that subject matter, and you’d be right about that fact. 100% right. I feel like I want to admit as well that when I was watching this flick, I was reminded of an episode of The Simpsons where Springfield was briefly turned into hipsterville Portland, and the new music teachers at Springfield Elementary, being The Decemberists, ask the class “Who wants to learn a song about press gangs and infanticide?” and the kids enthusiastically raise their hands.
It was somewhat amusing at the time because, yes, the Decemberists have songs that mention naval press gangs AND songs about infanticide, and they’re such inherently unpleasant subjects that no-one, really, wants to learn songs about any of that. And yet The Decemberists exists, and this flick exists.
Karoline is brought so low that the only way out is through using a very long knitting needle, but a woman urges her not to do it, and that there’s another, better way. All she has to do is carry the infant to term, and then bring it to her, and, for a modest fee, she’ll ensure the baby is adopted by a lovely bourgeois family. The phrase “doctors or lawyers” is used so often it becomes bitterly ironic.
By this point Karoline is destitute, her lost husband Peter (Besir Zeciri) having returned from the war with wounds to his face so severe that he wears strange masks to spare other people’s feelings at almost all times. You’d think this would make things easier, but they somehow get worse, prompting some harsh words from Karoline, yet she at least repents, in time.
Her baby is born, and she thinks “Damn, I wish I lived in a country with effective birth control or a social safety net that would support me and my child in these impoverished times”, but she has to deal with her contemporary Danish society, not the one that will exist a hundred years hence. She takes the baby to Dagmar, pays what she has, and then leaves.
Of course she regrets it and changes her mind, but when she returns the baby has already been adopted out, or so Dagmar says. Something compels Karoline to keep hanging around, and she eventually has moved in with Dagmar, working at her shop, breastfeeding Dagmar’s child Erena (Avo Knox Martin) to get rid of her unwanted breastmilk, and to keep that child happy.
Does it matter that Erena is, like, eight or so? This film does shy away from the realities of what it’s actually about (infanticide), but it does not shy away from the realities that go along with childbirth, which include a lot of breastfeeding. Karoline, who is fairly passive throughout the whole film, experiences the constant need to breastfeed beyond the ‘reality’ of her circumstances, in that, I think the flick keeps that connection to her baby as a continuous line, because she should not have had to give it up in the first place.
More women come along, and Dagmar keeps receiving these babies from these deeply conflicted women, who just cannot afford to keep their own babies, and who believe in the alternate reality that Dagmar proposes to them.
We’re not under any illusions, though. I think the audience understands pretty early on that Dagmar takes money from people, takes their babies, and then gets rid of the babies. And of course it’s horrifying. It’s horrific. It’s beyond horrific.
Are we even waiting for an explanation, an excuse? Could any backstory justify such a monster?
This is an intriguing question for me, not only because this is a theme in another recent flick, this time from Greece, again set in a similar time period, again showing the brutal lives of poor women and the murder of infant children (that flick is literally called The Murderess). It’s intriguing because these flicks share themes about how awful patriarchal, conservative societies are for poor women especially, and how, in a very twisted way, both perpetrators justify their actions thinking these children are better off dead anyway.
In other words, I think the first “part” of these films’ depictions of just how powerless these women are in their respective societies and how little recourse they have for autonomy or self-determination makes an explicitly feminist set of arguments, but the back end of these stories really seems like less of an argument, and more an awful howl in the face of the void. Evil provoked by awful circumstances maybe becomes more understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily become more acceptable. We’re not, I don’t think, expected to see their side of things beyond acknowledge the deep unfairness of a society that would push women to these extreme actions.
Whether we sympathise or not, well, that’s another question. Dagmar is a monster, I don’t think the flick is arguing anything to the contrary, but she is not entirely unsympathetic. We sense that she is not completely convinced of her own righteousness, hence the ether addiction, but the fact that it takes a physical toll on her doesn’t lessen our horror at what she does.
The question becomes whether Karoline will become her apprentice, and carry on her diabolical work.
As I’ve tried to get clear right from the start this is grim cinema of abject misery, but it is in no way exploitative or transgressive for transgression’s sake. I think it’s beyond what most people would be comfortable with, given that it’s an exponent of a very small sub-genre of movies that represents times and places where women don’t have access to appropriate health care as being truly barbaric and inhumane eras that we should never return to. Unless of course you’re American, and in one of the 24 or so states where women’s health doesn’t mean shit anymore or never did and women aren’t worth anything near as much as a nebulous, unborn foetus that the same state won’t support in any way once its born.
How this flick managed to somehow wangle a happy ending, I will never figure out. It’s perhaps due to the careful way in which the screenplay was put together. Karoline, I feel pretty confident in saying this, probably doesn’t have a historical analogue (ie. she’s probably a fictional character, created solely for Dagmar to talk to for our benefit and try to seduce to the dark side). But her tortured, tormented, confused eyes are the mirror we need and look through in order to see the magnitude of the horror in this cold and indifferent world. Both central performances couldn’t be more different, but both of them are incredible performances.
Dagmar defiant on the stand… I’ve never seen anything so furious. It’s amazing, but it’s a hard watch.
8 times slide this Blu-ray in between your copies of Requiem for a Dream and We Need to Talk About Kevin on your shelf out of 10
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“The world is a horrible place. But we need to believe it isn’t so.” - The Girl with the Needle
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