Roughly an hour into “The Girl with the Needle”, there’s a moment so shocking it “elicited gasps of outrage” across the cinema, said Kevin Maher in The Times.
Set in post-First World War Copenhagen, the true-life drama had, until that point, been unfolding as a “gripping story of female struggle”. Then the “twist hits” and Magnus von Horn’s “inky” black-and-white film transforms into “one of the most disturbing gothic horrors of recent years”. “Forget Bill Skarsgard in ‘Nosferatu‘”, this is a disconcerting study of “living terror and the darkest amorality”.
The action follows “destitute” seamstress Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) who finds herself pregnant, unemployed and without a home, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. A “chance encounter” with Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a friendly woman who runs a sweetshop and backstreet adoption agency, offers a glimmer of hope for a better life. But hope, like everything in this “horribly compelling” film, is “threadbare, undernourished and rotten to the core”.
Cinematographer Michal Dymek and production designer Jagna Dobesz have conjured up a gloomy gothic world of “winding cobblestone streets” and “Escher-like staircases”, said Catherine Wheatley in Sight and Sound. Shot in high-contrast monochrome, “skewed, anxiety-inducing angles” contribute to a feeling of “looming dread, dwarfing Karoline or boxing her in”.
Von Horn’s “dark and scorching” film “draws a grim true story from the Danish capital’s past and spins it halfway to a Grimm one”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. The Swedish director records Karoline’s “spiralling hopelessness” with “steely exactitude” and Dyrholm is “terrific” in the “tricky” role of Dagmar, “exuding a chill even during acts of ostensible kindness”.
Sonne gives a “phenomenal, feral” performance as Karoline, portraying her as a “sly and opportunistic emotional scavenger” with a “capacity for cruelty”, said Ide in The Observer.
As the film draws to a close, added Wheatley in Sight and Sound, “what lingers in the memory is the stench of fear and the shuddering horror of this rotten world, which might not, after all, be so far from our own”.