The Girl with the Needle (2024)

Unrated, which is odd because this is an easy R-rating.  I don't necessarily understand how studios contact the MPA about getting a rating for a movie.  This movie is up for an Academy Award.  Maybe the studio was afraid of an NC-17 for being so heart-wrenching?  While the movie is visually upsetting, the real horrors aren't really shown on screen.  Still, there is nudity, an attempted abortion, and the film is about baby murders.  A lady straight up adopts children only to murder them.  Yeah, this is a brutal movie.  

DIRECTOR: Magnus von Horn

If I can write about this movie, I could be caught up before the deluge of other movies come in tomorrow.  That's a bad motivator for writing.  I want to take a break.  I want to be doing something mindless.  But instead I'm writing about a morally disturbing film that didn't make me feel good about the world.  Thanks a lot, Academy.  I have to talk about something else that's terminally bleak.

Before we start talking morality and ethics, I want to make one comment that colored how I watched the film.  If I tried to make a film look artsier, I couldn't.  It's (almost) 4:3, black-and-white, heavy shadows.  It's in Danish.  Danish.  The movie is a black-and-white, 4:3, high contrast Danish movie.  Yeah, it looks pretty as heck.  But it is almost checking the boxes for what makes a movie look artsy-fartsy.  Are there any fun or happy moments in this movie?  Heck no.  This is about bleakness.  It's misery distilled into a depressing coffee drip that is going to make you hate yourself and the world around you.  It's not a bad thing.  I often like depressing.  And in terms of actually presenting depressing in a meaningful way, The Girl with the Needle absolutely nails tone for what it is talking about.  Still, man, this movie is almost a parody of an international art picture. Do I hate that?  Probably not.  It looks phenomenal.  But I also have a hard time taking it seriously as well.  Just the attempt to be Ingmar Bergman at every turn is a bit much.

Okay, let's wade out into the deep.  This is going to be a tough one to talk about because it is a movie that is both about abortion while not being about abortion.  If you think I'm overthinking it, the movie is called The Girl with the Needle.  The eponymous girl is the protagonist, but she is the avatar for the audience.  Yes, she has her own moral choices that she makes and she is a character that is not a flat, empty vessel for us to go on this ride with.  No, she is the character who tries to have an abortion in the opening act of the movie.  Okay.  The needle in question is a knitting needle with which Karoline tries to abort her baby in a public bathhouse.  The easy read of this might be a pro-life stance.  After all, Karoline meets Dagmar, who murders newborns and dumps them in sewers.  While Dagmar thinks that she is doing the moral thing by murdering these babies, the mothers who think that they are giving their children up for adoption are outraged by her killings.  Considering that this is based on a true story, Dagmar is considered one of the most prolific serial killers in Denmark.  The one-to-one link makes the movie look pro-life.  After all, it is a throughline between Karoline's abortion attempt that leads her to go through a horror show of newborn murder and the jump between fetus and newborn becomes tenuously thin.

But The Girl with the Needle doesn't really let the pro-life movement off the hook.  Again, I'm writing this from a Catholic perspective and I may need to remind people that I didn't write this movie.  But what I think the movie is getting at is that Karoline shouldn't have been even in the position to have to give herself an abortion in a bathhouse.  That seems minor, but there are a wealth of things that remind her that life is misery for women, especially for women with little money.  Nothing good happens to Karoline in this movie.  There are moments when she experiences happiness.  I couldn't say that she's happy.  But there are times when she feels like she is getting some kind of fulfillment out of her job working for Dagmar.  However, even those happy moments are just disguised cruelty.  When Karoline fails to abort her child, she's offered this hope that pro-lifers tend to hand out: "You can always give the baby up for adoption."  Now, The Girl with the Needle is meant to be a horror movie. Yeah, it's based on a true story and it's bleak.  The events of this may not be typical, but it might work as an allegory.  There is this understanding that once that child is handed off after birth, life should be amazing for that child.  Again, didn't write the movie.  But the movie actually says at one point that parent thought that they were pawning their kids off to doctors and lawyers, offering these children a life that they wouldn't have had otherwise.  

And Dagmar is as morally gray as a serial killer can be.  I think we're supposed to be horrified by her actions, especially when she tries getting Karoline involved in the actual murders.  Dagmar's evil stems from the fact that she makes money off of these women while justifying to herself that she's doing a moral good.  Her skewed moral sense comes from the fact that no one else is going to do anything with these children, so she doesn't mind being the one who steps in and does the devil's dirty work.  It's that same logic that comes from a butcher who prepares meat.  You don't want to kill what you eat, so it's better that this stuff is done out of sight and out of mind.  But the problem with Dagmar lies in how she treats Karoline.  Karoline tries to have an abortion and fails.  Dagmar scolds her, telling her that there are people out there who would want her child.  Dagmar, knowing that Karoline's child will be just another victim, manipulates Karoline into paying her just for Dagmar to murder the child.  But I do believe that Dagmar thinks that she is doing the right thing, even if it is just because of that final defense at her criminal trial.  She does the thing that society needs her to do because abortion is difficult.

But then again, the movie does give some pro-life vibes as well.  After all, Karoline's entire character shift is one of regret.  She hates the child when she is pregnant.  It is a reminder of the fact that she was used by the rich.  She hates the child when her disfigured and traumatized husband loves the child.  She feels imprisoned by him and the child is another way to lock her into a marriage that she does not want.  But when she gives the child to Dagmar, Karoline's motivation to get involved with Dagmar is two-fold: she feels like a mother and she should do motherly duties for those other children coupled with the desire to find out what happened to her child.  It is a story of a regretted abortion in a lot of ways.  

The big takeaway is that I don't think that the movie is going to give us an easy answer on this one.  For the sake of writing this blog, I'm glad that it didn't?  I don't know.  Just to make this blog all the more incendiary, it reminds me of the Israel / Palestine thing.  (Geez Louise, what am I doing?)  I do have a take on all of this stuff, but that take is laced with a degree of nuance.  No one is a good guy in this fight.  I think that is the most challenging thing that I can post on this.  Do I think that one side has more ground to stand on?  Absolutely.  Do I have a take?  Yeah, but it isn't as clean as either side would like for it to be.  That's what The Girl with the Needle is.  It may have a clear take that the director has in mind.  It might even be explicit to both the director and to certain audiences.  But what I'm seeing is a gorgeous mess of ethical questions.  Ultimately, it keeps taking me back to a place that reminds me that the world is becoming worse and worse because humanity is full of terrible people.  

But because I shouldn't be let completely off the hook, I do have to say one controversial thing.  I'm going to answer a question: Do I think Dagmar is a monster?  Yes.  I know that she thinks that she's doing something that society needs.  But it's in the same way that I think that Thanos is a monster.  (See, I take all vulnerability and I throw it out the window when I equate a nuanced argument with Avengers: Endgame.)  It seems trivial, but it comes from the lies of it all.  It's the profit and the comfort that she has with her actions.  Karoline hates Dagmar by the end.  She wants her child.  She wants to breastfeed because she knows that those children are scared and trusting.  And I do think that a lot of the movie is Dagmar having to face her own evils.  Dagmar knows that she is the bad guy, despite her protestations that she is doing what society is afraid to do.  It makes little to no sense that she would take Karoline on under her wing unless Dagmar was questioning her own morality in the whole thing.  After all, these children don't need breastmilk if Dagmar is just going to kill these children at her earliest possible convenience.  It's only when Karoline gets on her bad side when her friends recognize her that Dagmar goes on the offensive when it comes to convincing Karoline that Dagmar isn't evil.  It's almost a violent defense of a flame that is extinguishing.  A desperation to hold onto something that is screaming to be removed.

It is a gorgeous movie.  It hurts in all the ways that it should.  One of the greatest moments I had in college was when I got frustrated with a role I was playing.  I was the Everyman in A Man for All Seasons and I kept on trying to unpack and seeing this character from all perspectives and I couldn't get it immediately.  That's what The Girl with the Needle offers.  It's not easy to unpack.  I like that.  I don't know if I'm the perfect audience for it, but that's what the best evangelization does. It forces you to fight with long held beliefs, much like Dagmar does for the majority of the movie.