The Girl with the Needle

A film set in Copenhagen at the start of the twentieth century, drawn from a real case. Karoline is a young woman working in a textile workshop. Her husband has not come back from the war. She begins a relationship with the factory's owner and becomes pregnant; he refuses to marry her. A child out of wedlock meant social death for a woman at the time, and Karoline has no options. At a bathhouse she meets a woman called Dagmar, who presents herself as an intermediary: she takes unwanted babies and finds families for them. Karoline begins helping her. Dagmar Overbye was a real person. She was held responsible for the deaths of many infants in Denmark between 1913 and 1920, and the trial was the largest news of its day. The film's choice is to build the narrative through Karoline rather than Dagmar. So the subject is not a portrait of a killer but the conditions that brought women to that door. It was shot in black and white and the image is deliberately hard. Vic Carmen Sonne plays Karoline and Trine Dyrholm plays Dagmar. It competed at Cannes in 2024. A strong work for anyone who likes historical drama and hard social narrative. Before you watch, know this: the subject is the deaths of infants and the film softens nothing.