The Girl With the Needle is a gorgeous Danish nightmare
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Born in 1887, Dagmar Overby was a Danish woman who worked as a "baby farmer," taking in unwanted children from parents unable to care for them in the harsh post-WWI economic climate. One day, a young mother overcome by regret returned to Dagmar begging for her baby back, leading to police breaking into her house and discovering the child’s remains. She would be tried in 1921 and found guilty for the murder of nine infants.
The story
Freshly Oscar-nominated Danish film The Girl with the Needle is a nightmare, but it’s a gorgeous one. The lush silvery black and white cinematography drapes every scene with a stylized, eerie effect, like a real life Nosferatu.
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The story kicks off with the eviction of Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), whose work in a linen factory isn’t enough to stop her being tossed out of her home after her husband disappears in the battlefields. Karoline is someone we have encountered dozens of times in true crime tales—tenuously employed, led on by men with dubious motivations, bound for the gutter. We know what happens to these women, and Karoline hits every branch on the suffering tree as she descends. Sonne equips Karoline with a fierceness that keeps her going, even as she’s pregnant, starving, and trying not to get kicked out of her squalid rented room. This is the girl; the needle is the implement she uses for an attempted abortion.
Her failed abortion attempt occurs at a public baths where she meets Dagmar, an older woman who sees what Karoline is up to and makes her a better offer. In exchange for Karoline’s baby, and a fee, Dagmar will place the child with a family who are rich but childless—“doctors, lawyers, people like that.”
Director Magnus von Horn has called his movie a “fairy tale for grown-ups”, and Dagmar (played by legendary Danish performer Trine Dyrholm, who has won Mads Mikkelsen-levels of Danish acting awards), is the wicked witch. While she doesn’t have a cauldron, she has a sweetshop, an intoxicating bottle of ether, and a notebook with details of every child who has come through her ad hoc adoption organization. Karoline is lured back to work for her as a wet nurse, accepting the candy and comfort that Dagmar provides, as well as the babies that show up at her doorstep.
The problem with the fairy tale tone, complete with a mid-film drug trip and a scene at an actual freak show, is that it sticks out as prestige horror padding. For a long time, baby farming was a common practice in many countries, and of course most practitioners weren’t killers, but daycare providers of a sort that were the inevitable entrepreneurship produced by parental need. The icy facts of the Overby case are so terrifying not because they seem so remote, but because of the mirror it held up to a society when illegitimacy is shameful, maternal healthcare barely exists, and there is no support in place for those who fall through the cracks.
Draping the Overby story with licks of body horror detracts from the emotional ballast of the story. But despite the gothic novel dressing, if you can bear the subject matter this is a riveting thriller, anchored by two extraordinary performances with an all-too topical resonance.
The Girl with the Needle is currently streaming on Mubi and in limited cinematic release