The Girl with the Needle

This Danish nominee for the best international feature Oscar is a disturbing mix of historical drama, psychological thriller and body horror.

“The Girl with the Needle” is one of those films that stubbornly refuses to fit into any neat category.

It wears the clothes of a historical prestige drama, the sort of thing that gets nominated for awards — and indeed, just last week the Dutch film was a surprise nominee in the Academy Awards for best international feature. Shot in gorgeously austere black-and-white (cinematography by Michał Dymek) and with spot-on production values, it looks like an Oscar-nominated film.

Tonally it’s more experimental and dour, toying around with uncomfortable norms about people’s appearance, bordering on a fetish for freakishness.

In a lot of ways, it’s a body horror film, where the pervading feeling that builds in the audience is fear. The story seems rather normal and even staid, but it gradually peels off one layer after another, revealing something truly monstrous.

Directed by Magnus von Horn (“Sweat”) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Line Langebek, it is currently available for streaming on MUBI.

Vic Carmen Sonne plays Karoline Nielsen, a young seamstress working in the Kitzler Sewing Factory as World War I slowly trundles to a close. She struggles to afford even a single room in a tenement building, and indeed as the story opens she’s being tossed into the streets.

Her husband, Peter, disappeared fighting in the war a year ago. But because he has not officially been declared dead, she is not afforded the standard widow’s pension. She appeals to the owner of the factory, Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup), for help. He takes pity on her, leading to an illicit romance.

Karoline becomes pregnant, and Jørgen is prepared to marry her, but then a couple of things happen: his mother forbids the marriage, and fires her from the factory to boot. And Peter suddenly shows up out of nowhere, alive — but very much not well.

Her husband has been deeply wounded, both psychologically and physically. He wears a terrifying mask to cover the damaged parts of his face; in some ways it’s even worse on than off. What’s more, he seems completely broken, unable to even have sex, so Karoline coldly casts him out, just as she has been.

Karoline goes to a public bath house with a huge needle and attempts to self-abort. But she’s helped by a kindly older woman, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who has a daughter, Erena (Avo Knox Martin), who seems far too young to be her biological child. Dagmar runs a candy shop, but has a side business helping out destitute young girls like Karoline, finding good homes for their babies for a small fee.

Karoline eventually returns to Dagmar for help with her own newborn daughter, and finds giving up the infant is far easier than she’d thought. Lacking other options, she offers herself up as a wet nurse for the foster babies until Dagmar finds a suitable home for them.

The relationship between the two women and the little girl continues to get stranger and stranger. Though seemingly a prim matronly woman, Dagmar dallies with a much younger man (Ari Alexander) and doses herself with liquid ether to combat her melancholy moods. Soon Karoline is hooked on the stuff, too. She also finds herself tending to Erena’s needs in a way she did not expect.

Things go on form there, which I’ll not reveal. But suffice to say Karoline becomes sucked into a dark world of depravity and self-delusion.

The film’s most unsettling theme is women’s ambivalent attitude about becoming mothers. Karoline was eager at the prospect when it meant marrying a rich man. She even bragged to her best friend, Frida (Tessa Hoder), that she’ll come live with them to oversee the house maids, and even have one of her own.

But being a mother to a pathetic wretch like Peter is unacceptable to her, even when her husband seems enthusiastic about raising a child he knows is sired by another man.

And then there’s Dagmar, who tells every one of her young clients they’re doing the right thing by putting their unwanted babies in her hands. And yet she’s very clear about telling Karoline they’re running a business, and not to get attached to the babies — even refusing to give them names.

Neither heroine or villain, Karoline somehow still evokes our sympathy, despite her bad choices and callousness toward Peter. She’s a woman with few options stuck in a time and place where women had little agency to make decisions for themselves. The babies she and Dagmar traffic in are perhaps the only creatures more vulnerable than herself.

At a tick over two hours, “The Girl with the Needle” could have used some judicious editing. The pace sometimes flags, particularly when the women turn to drugs to initiate a fugue state, where Karoline sees faces contorting and transforming into shapes both ghastly and lovely. (And remind us of Peter.)

What makes this story even more disturbing is that it’s based on true events. I suggest not Googling them beforehand and go in fresh, so the foulness can slow reveal its twisted face.