There is a rug-pull moment in Magnus von Horn’s handsome and captivating period yarn that cleaves his drama into “before” and “after.” It is a testament to the rich and assured storytelling on offer in his Cannes competition entry “The Girl with the Needle” that, although the moment seems to come out of nowhere, it instantly makes sense and serves to ratchet up the tension, propelling the story’s evergreen themes into a confrontational new register.
In post-World War I Copenhagen, we drop in with Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) as she is being evicted from a pleasant room in a respectable part of town. With her soldier husband Mia, her factory worker wages don’t cover the rent and she has fallen into arrears. The rapacious need of this time is telegraphed as mere minutes after Karoline receives her marching orders, the woman replacing her arrives to look over the room.
In post-World War I Copenhagen, we drop in with Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) as she is being evicted from a pleasant room in a respectable part of town. With her soldier husband Mia, her factory worker wages don’t cover the rent and she has fallen into arrears. The rapacious need of this time is telegraphed as mere minutes after Karoline receives her marching orders, the woman replacing her arrives to look over the room.
- 5/15/2024
- by Sophie Monks Kaufman
- Indiewire
In a pre-feminist age, Karoline is what entirely too many people would call a “fallen woman.” Alone, unemployed and pregnant by a man not her husband, she is acknowledged only to be punished, and invisible for all remaining purposes. Women like Karoline don’t fall of their own accord. They’re dropped, often from a great height, by a ruling patriarchy that doesn’t even care to watch them splatter. That involuntary descent, to not just a grimy gutter but a near-Hadean underworld of human cruelty, is the chief horror in “The Girl With the Needle,” Magnus von Horn’s extraordinary and upsetting film — an adult fairytale abundantly populated with witches and wretches, but where society is revealed as the true monster.
Von Horn’s previous feature “Sweat,” a selection for the scrapped 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, offered a very different study of femininity bending over backwards to meet societal standards.
Von Horn’s previous feature “Sweat,” a selection for the scrapped 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, offered a very different study of femininity bending over backwards to meet societal standards.
- 5/15/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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