Critics reviews

Director Magnus von Horn, whose previous film was the equally impressive Sweat... frequently lights actors from beneath. A deliberately unflattering approach borrowed from horror cinema, it turns faces into grotesque gargoyles, strips them of softness and humanity and highlights the animalistic savagery. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sonne’s phenomenal, feral performance... It’s a remarkable film: bleak, but horribly compelling.

Magnus von Horn has billed his splendid, sombre third feature as a fairy tale for grown-ups... Michal Dymek, the film’s cinematographer, and Jagna Dobesz, its production designer, cast history as Stygian gloom. The script, which von Horn wrote with Line Langebek, carefully rifles through contemporaneous grotesquerie... The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.

The Girl with the Needle builds to some truly nightmarish and unbelievably sickening material, smartly knowing what not to show and how the sounds of such grim acts alone can cause a pit in one’s stomach to sink deeper... It’s unforgettably rattling but vital.

The Girl with the Needle poses questions about what really draws us to stories of violence and criminality. More importantly, it provides a vital counter-narrative to how those stories can be told, and where their soul and poetry truly lie.

This is a relentlessly grim piece of filmmaking, a reminder that women on the fringe of the economic ladder have been marginalized for generations, around the world... “The Girl with the Needle” becomes almost numbing in its brutality. Still, it’s a well-made drama with a resonance that echoes a hundred years after the crimes it documents.

The haunting atmosphere of “The Girl with the Needle” lies in equal measure with the acting masterclass that serves as the film’s primary source of fuel... A glimmer of hope does close the film, and in contrast to van Horn’s underseen 2020 satire “Sweat,” his current effort somehow feels far more timely as much as it is necessary. It’s impossible not to recommend.

Shot in black and white with plentiful shades of grey, The Girl With The Needle has about it something of the darkness of European films of that era, such as the early work of Fritz Lang... Von Horn observes but does not judge. Still, with the aid of a superb cast, he finds flickers of humanity in all his characters.

“The Girl With the Needle” is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.

Von Horn’s painterly control, along with Agnieszka Glińska’s measured cutting and Frederikke Sophie Hoffmeier’s brilliant, multi-layered score, envelops the viewer in an oppressive atmosphere and a tautness that won’t let up. Hard to watch yet gorgeous to behold, The Girl with the Needle is as grim as it is powerfully compelling.

It is a confrontational piece that explores issues of women's reproductive rights, and the terrible situations that are forced upon them when those rights are not freely given. It is not a movie with the intention of entertaining its audience, but rather of challenging, reminding, and warning.

The film is rich in its themes... And while the film may meander some, von Horn and Langebek’s script never loses sight of the story, offering something that is deeply bleak but also worth thinking about.

This kind of nihilism and cinematic misanthropy would perhaps unsurprisingly threaten to make the film oppressive to watch beyond even the degree to which this is absolutely intended, but that’s where the incredibly beautiful filmmaking of The Girl with the Needle raises it beyond the mere horrors of its depictions. Its visuals are absolutely stunning: Dramatic, high-contrast black and white cinematography captures a mythic, almost fairy tale sense of macabre wonder in the streets of the bleak, shadow-shrouded Copenhagen.