This grim and exceptionally stylish film centers on a Danish woman who becomes tied up in the black-market baby trade.
A couple of times in “The Girl With the Needle,” a grim story of a woman out of options, the director Magnus von Horn positions his camera in front of a mass of textile workers streaming out of the mill after their shifts. The moments pay homage to one of history’s first motion pictures, a Lumière film of employees leaving a factory.
If that early cinematic curiosity captured reality, von Horn’s piercing black-and-white film elevates it, filling its world with figures and places out of a Gothic fairy tale. Set in post-World War I Copenhagen, the story, inspired by true events, follows Karoline (a remarkable, often wordless Vic Carmen Sonne) as she finds herself in a series of spaces — grubby tenements, factory floors, a utilitarian bathhouse, a circus sideshow — connected only by a menacing mood and a winding maze of steep cobblestone streets.
The plot is a series of unfortunate events, with Karoline becoming pregnant by her boss only to be frozen out by his mother and fired from her job. At the same time, her husband, assumed to be dead, returns home from the war with his face disfigured. It’s a strong start for a story about how, amid hardship and desperation, compassion can wear thin.
But once the story veers into a local woman’s black-market adoption scheme, Karoline’s personal troubles are eclipsed by a greater evil — the details of which inspired the screenplay. These events scandalize, yet “The Girl With the Needle” is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.
The Girl With the Needle
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
