Film Information
Title: The Girl with the Needle
Director: Magnus von Horn
Cast: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm
Year: 2024 (international release 2025)
Genre: Historical Drama / Crime
Country: Denmark
From the opening shots, you feel that this film isn’t here to entertain you-it’s here to confine you. The Girl with the Needle does not frighten with sudden shocks but with a steady pressure that never lets up. The light is cold, the frames are narrow, and the camera stays dangerously close to faces, as if to trap both the characters and the audience in the same airless room. It’s not a film that screams; it suffocates.
Caroline, a young and impoverished woman in post-war Copenhagen, is fighting to survive in a city where hope has long been rationed. Vic Carmen Sonne gives a performance of quiet devastation-raw, unembellished, and deeply human. When she meets Dagmar, played with chilling restraint by Trine Dyrholm, what begins as an act of charity slowly turns into horror. Dyrholm’s calm voice and careful posture hide something far darker beneath, and the two women’s interactions become a study in control and dependency, framed as if the walls themselves are complicit.
The camera never grants them space. Every composition feels locked, every movement restricted. Magnus von Horn shoots with the precision of someone who understands that claustrophobia is not only physical but moral. The black-and-white cinematography isn’t a stylistic flourish-it’s a statement. Each shadow feels heavier than light, each reflection a reminder that empathy and guilt can coexist inside the same body.
The film is based on a real case from early-20th-century Denmark: the crimes of Dagmar Overbye, a woman convicted of murdering infants placed in her care. Yet von Horn doesn’t make a crime movie. He makes a social autopsy. His real subject is the system that allowed such horror to exist-poverty, shame, and the way society abandons its women to desperation. The evil here isn’t supernatural; it’s bureaucratic and silent.
What makes the film haunting is its emotional tone. Fear doesn’t come from what’s shown but from what lingers just outside the frame. The quiet moments-when no one speaks, when a door closes too slowly-carry more dread than any violent scene could. It’s a horror born of empathy, where you can’t decide whether to pity or recoil from what you see.
By the time the story reaches its ending, the rhythm has slowed to near stillness. Caroline sits, motionless, and the silence weighs more than words. There’s no neat resolution, no sense of redemption. The camera simply stays, unblinking, and leaves you in the same confinement it began with. When the screen fades, you realize the true horror was not the act of killing but the society that looked away.
The Girl with the Needle is not an easy watch, nor is it meant to be. It’s a film that exposes pain rather than explains it. The performances are immaculate, the direction merciless, and the mood relentlessly dark. Yet beneath its bitterness lies something profoundly human-the recognition that cruelty often grows in the cracks where compassion has been forgotten.
Sources
The Guardian – “Inside Denmark’s Oscars entry about a serial child murderer”
Financial Times – “A grim chapter in Danish history made fine cinema”
RogerEbert.com – The Girl with the Needle film review
