‘The Girl With the Needle’ Started With Denmark’s Most Infamous Serial Killer, But Ended as “Coming-of-Age” Tale

Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With the Needle is a gritty view into the cold, often choiceless world of women in 1919 Copenhagen. Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a poor seamstress, abandoned first by her husband whom she hasn’t heard from since he left to fight in the war and later by her wealthy boss by whom she becomes pregnant, is the vessel through which audiences experience desperation. Her decision to give her baby up for adoption exposes the sinister dealings of Dagmar Overbye (Trine Dyrholm), the female Danish serial killer whose true-life murder of dozens of children in the 1910s inspired the film.

It’s those heinous acts and the dark circumstances that befall Karoline and those around her that rightfully designate the film a gothic horror, but terror isn’t the sentiment von Horn wants viewers to be left with.

“It’s a coming-of-age story in one way about a young woman who struggles to get a better life for herself, but eventually she starts doing something for someone else, and there’s hope in that,” says the writer-director of the film’s ending, in which Karoline adopts Dagmar’s daughter, Erena (Ava Knox Martin). “It’s a way to take all this dark energy in this film and spin it into something hopeful. I want to believe that about the world.”

Why did you feel now is the right time for this film?

On a very personal level, it was a film that developed over the course of time when laws in Poland on abortion changed, and some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe were introduced in 2020. That really made the film gain a different level for me, in the sense that it’s very important in the society where I live and I am fighting for freedom of choice for women and my community. It has reflected similarly in the U.S. for obvious reasons, and it’s been reconfirmed in other countries, like Denmark and Sweden, though the conversation is different because those are both societies that respect the freedom of choice. In South Korea, at the Busan Film Festival, we were speaking a lot about the real story that this film is based on as a kind of Danish national trauma. Many countries have national traumas connected to unwanted children and what has been done with them. So it has had different connections depending on where you live on the planet, but what it talks about is an oppressive society and what happens to people when they don’t have a choice, and they still keep fighting for alternatives. But not being offered a choice or not being offered help, you start looking for these alternatives in dangerous places.

What did shooting in black and white allow you to achieve cinematically that you wouldn’t have in color?

It creates a kind of distance needed for the audience to be able to grasp this film and digest the story. It offers kind of a feeling of safety in a way at the beginning of the film, and I think as you watch it, we get closer and closer to the emotional story and eventually the film crawls up on you and you stop feeling that it’s set in the past. It gives a kind of aesthetic filter needed to be able to take in such a violent, dark story. If there could be a contemporary version of this film set in today’s society, somewhere in the countryside of Poland in color, it could be very documentary-like, very raw and realistic, but I think it would be too difficult to watch.

Why did you choose the singular experience of Karoline as the entry point into this larger story?

We never intended to make a biopic about a serial killer. It’s morally dubious to do that. I felt strongly that we needed a story we can connect to, and we need to tell the story of where she comes from, not only as a trampoline to get into Dagmar, but to also respect the life she has previous to meeting Dagmar. That’s very inspiring because the element of fiction becomes stronger in the sense of what we can decide to tell about this woman. This is a film about a woman who is struggling to get a better life for herself in a very harsh and tough society, and she refuses to accept the cards she has been dealt. That story is equally important to the true crimes the film is based on because it leads to the reason why these crimes could happen. It’s not about a serial killer who just kidnapped babies to kill them. It’s a story about women who gave their babies to this woman and paid her and allowed themselves to believe in this kind of naive story that they would find great homes, and that says so much about society and the times and what kind of climate and the options these women had.

The scene when Dagmar forces Karoline to crush an infant between the two women’s bodies is haunting.

I think there’s a paradox in the bathhouse scene, which is that Karoline goes there to have an abortion, and her pregnancy is saved by a woman who later takes the life of that baby and gives Karoline a life [as a wet nurse] and helps her up, but eventually also kills that baby, too. It’s horrible and it’s a horrible way to kill a baby, but the hug is somehow a strange reflection of the tenderness between those women or also what Karoline can mean to Dagmar. It’s a desperate act in this sense for Dagmar to have Karoline do it, because that means she is less alone, maybe there’s someone that can take over for her, maybe if she can convince Karoline of this, she can justify her acts. What also happens in this hug is Dagmar falls down on top of her; there’s a sense almost like a rape in it. It was something we found on set to be extremely inspiring, this frame where we could have the whole scene and just take it from that one angle. It became so much stronger than it would have ever become if we would have started to go in and do close-ups of them or be more graphic about it, because I think the strongest thing for the audience is what we don’t see. It’s like what Hitchcock said, our imagination will always be stronger than anything we can ever show.

You’ve called this film, with its mashup of monsters, saviors and poor maidens, a “fairy tale for grown-ups.” What message do you hope audiences walk away with?

That it might be attractive and even nice for a while to float with the devil, and it might be more of a struggle to believe in love and do something good, but in the end it always makes more sense and it’s always worth the struggle not to accept the simple escape. Even in the darkest places there is hope, but it requires effort, and I think that’s the choice Karoline makes in the end. You can float away in an ether high and forget the world outside, but the right thing to do is jump out of the window and go and get Erena from the orphanage.

This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.