"Evil is logical, like madness: it is a response to reality, but it is never the right response."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Black and white, dark.

Deformed, monstrous faces: they seem like portraits by Francis Bacon. Disturbing music.

Karoline has not paid for her room in 14 weeks and must leave because the landlord no longer gives her credit. Her husband has been missing for a year, and he does not respond to her letters.

We are in Copenhagen towards the end of World War I; she works in a factory, where many women sew war uniforms. The owner seems to take an interest in her problem, and also in her body, and the girl becomes pregnant.

Meanwhile, her husband returns: he wears a mask, he has been disfigured, and does not have the courage to show his monstrous appearance. She welcomes him but later throws him out, confessing that she is expecting a child from another man.

The father of the child, a very wealthy owner, mild and passive, would also like to marry her, but his mother gives him an ultimatum: he can marry her only by renouncing the house and money. Thus, Karoline loses her job as well.

At the public baths, she meets a woman, Dagmar:

She notices the iron that the young woman is inserting into her uterus and suggests that she turn to her once the child is born. A girl will be born, and Karoline follows her advice, but in order to pay for the woman to find a family for her daughter, she offers her labor: she will care for and breastfeed babies before they are adopted, living with the grocer Dagmar, who in turn has a daughter, Erena.

The cohabitation seems to work until Karoline discovers the secret that rules the house.

To all the women who hand over their children, Dagmar always repeats the same phrase: "You did the right thing... soon you will feel better."

The atrocity revealed in Karoline’s existential journey seems unbearable, incomprehensible, unsustainable. Dagmar cannot stand the girl's attachment to the children, even though she insists on breastfeeding her now-grown daughter. Karoline is unable to suppress her maternal instincts, which she could not afford to realize. On the other hand, Dagmar had promised that the children would go to “people who can afford to do good,” like doctors and lawyers... And yet, a child with cleft lip arrives who no one will ever want.

Based on a tragic and inescapable story, that of Dagmar Johanne Amalie Overbye, who between 1913 and 1920 ended the lives of many children before being sentenced to death and dying behind bars at the age of 42, Magnus von Horn’s work stands as a grim reflection on the atrocities of the human condition and the abysses that motherhood can hide. A theater of solitude and female vulnerability, where the birth of a new life becomes the prelude to an inner and social existential agony. The world that von Horn portrays is one of pervasive cruelty, where evil is just one of the many manifestations of a brutal society that leaves no room for mercy. The Danish director’s choice to include a circus of deformities and oddities is not accidental: it becomes a metaphor for a desperate reality, for a condition with no way out. Here, like in an eternal lament, the world reveals itself as it is: a horrible place, yet one where it is necessary to believe it can be different, no matter how illusory.

The first sequence, visually twisted and hallucinatory, showing the faces and souls of the protagonists, serves as a gateway to understanding the essence of The Girl with the Needle. It is a film about the monstrousness of human beings, a journey into suffering where survival becomes a condition of perpetual martyrdom, crushed in the depths of a denied existence.

In a black-and-white that is never pure, the film appears as a vortex that centrifuges the characters and their stories, forcing the viewer to confront the shadows, the forces that run through their lives. In this space without peace, the boundaries between good and evil dissolve, cancel out, and exchange, as if they were part of a greater design, a chaos that knows no justice.

This is a film about the invisible, about what cannot be seen and what cannot be said.

An horizon that calling opaque seems superficial: Dagmar embodies the horrible world she tends to describe, despite needing to resort to ether to anesthetize emotion and loneliness.

A woman who has her own vision of the world: motherhood has always accompanied her in a conflicted, hostile manner, and the calling she recognizes in herself embodies a choice, however conscious, a mission, of which she feels herself the bearer for other mothers who cannot, for economic, social, or cultural reasons, keep a child.

Such acute suffering that no means, not even the most powerful narcotics, can soothe it.

The film explores the deformity of both past and present existence: a work that, while seeming exaggerated, overflowing, excessive, as many have tried to insinuate, avoids all forms of self-indulgence, depicting the deformity of bodies and minds in a spiral that transfigures them, twists them, and renders them irredeemably terrifying. Faces overlap, deform, revealing the terror that inhabits them like in a gallery of portraits representing exiles, outcasts, abandoned ones, accompanied by the experimental music of Puce Mary Frederikke Hoffmeier.

The Girl with the Needle is a film of losses, of shattered illusions, where the only path to redemption seems to be an unexpected act of love, a spark of hope that shatters the chain of suffering and glimpses, if only for a fleeting moment, a light in the darkness.

The story of Dagmar Overbye is but the beginning of a larger path: a paradigmatic episode from which more profound reflections on the female condition, on motherhood, on guilt, and on social blindness branch out. The figure of this woman, intrinsically linked to Evil, appears to us as that of a creature convinced she is acting for Good, even though through distorted and perverse logic. She is both the executioner and the victim of an elitist reality that excludes those who do not matter, because they have no rights except to practice the horrors produced by others in secrecy.

And von Horn, while never judging her, never becomes a complicit spectator of her descent into madness. He seems to want to understand her, seeking a cause in her inhuman reasoning, which follows its own logic.

"The logic of evil is the logic of fear. And fear is always rational for the one who feels it, even if irrational for the one who observes it."

(Hannah Arendt)

18-Jan-2025 by Beatrice