Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Struggling to survive in post-WWI Copenhagen, a newly unemployed and pregnant young woman is taken in by a charismatic elder to help run an underground adoption agency. The two form an unexpected bond, until a sudden discovery changes everything.
The Girl with the Needle is a strikingly singular film — its oppressive, expressionistic black-and-white photography and bleak post-WWI Copenhagen setting give it a genuinely distinctive visual identity recalling early German expressionism filtered through a modern arthouse sensibility. The performances, particularly Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm, are hauntingly committed, grounding the film's descent into horror with uncomfortable authenticity. The novelty is high: this true-crime story is told with an unusual, suffocating poetic dread rather than conventional thriller mechanics. The plot, while compelling in its portrait of desperation and moral ambiguity, occasionally feels episodic and relies on an accumulation of suffering rather than tight narrative construction. The ending, while disturbing and tonally consistent, lands with somewhat more inevitability than surprise, given the based-on-true-events framing — effective but not revelatory.