In The Girl with the Needle, life is harsh. It centers around a woman’s experience in a community that is set up to oppress her and push her down. But The Girl with the Needle draws inspiration less from the films of Lars von Trier and more from the films of Pawel Pawlikowski, with a hint of David Fincher. There is extreme content and it is hard to watch at times, but it has real substance and social and political heft, not just empty shock value.
The Girl with the Needle follows Karoline, played by Vic Carmen Sonne. Karoline’s husband is missing at the tail end of World War I, and she is evicted from her apartment for failure to pay rent. She becomes pregnant and stumbles upon a woman named Dagmar, played by Trine Dyrholm, who runs a black market adoption agency.
I am talking around the plot a bit because The Girl with the Needle is very smart about doling out its revelations. It never feels exploitative, but it certainly gets uncomfortable, and that experience is carefully preserved for the viewer through the way the film withholds and presents information.
The film doesn’t so much want to blindside you with plot twists, as plant the seeds of suspicion in your head and pay them off. And importantly, all of the revelations are news to Karoline as well as to the viewer, which places you deeper into her perspective and makes the revelations feel less artificial.
Vic Carmen Sonne’s performance is sublime. She communicates so much with her face, in little grimaces or the way that she arches her eyebrows. But it isn’t always a performance where a lot goes unspoken. She has learned through the harsh forges of war and poverty to raise her voice when needed. Sonne is great in these moments when going big is required, too.
The film is littered with really precise and beautiful compositions. These are mostly static shots, perfectly symmetrical and direct at times, but at other times overhead or skewed at just the right angle. It is shot in a very crisp black and white, emphasizing the harshness of the subject matter and stripping any warmth out of the movie.
Though The Girl with the Needle is shocking, it understands that shock is a tool, not an end. It wants to place you in this historical perspective of this woman and consider how we propagate cultural norms that enforce oppression. The opening scene is key to frame the movie, as the landlord who is evicting Karoline is fairly reasonable – you almost feel bad for him. But reasonable people following cultural norms can be part of the problem.
It is important that those of us who have never experienced an unwanted pregnancy or extreme poverty can see firsthand the devastating effects. And this revelation and understanding of the past is the first step toward change.
