‘The Girl with the Needle’ interview: Magnus von Horn and Vic Carmen Sonne on their Oscar-nominated Danish thriller

By the time The Girl with the Needle premiered at Cannes, it was already draped in whispers of morbid curiosity. Billed as a historical psychological horror film, it lured audiences with the promise of a post-war true crime and the gothic expressionism that Robert Eggers was soon to reimagine in the same year, only to lock them in a suffocating embrace. The film follows Karolina, a wet nurse in 1919 Denmark, who unwittingly becomes entangled with a real-life baby farmer — a later euphemism for a serial killer specialising in infants. The singular cinematic experience, loosely inspired by the heinous crimes of Dagmar Overbye, is a dark fairytale dipped in arsenic and regret that has landed director Magnus von Horn his first Oscar nomination and marked Vic Carmen Sonne’s most searing performance to date.

In the aftermath of the film’s Oscar nomination among this year’s international heavyweights and Best Picture contenders, including Emilia Perez and I’m Still Here, as well as fellow Cannes alum The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I find the actress and filmmaker reflective yet still humming with the adrenaline of their festival summer, and energised by the response to their work. Together, they dissect the complexities of their film, which asks for a lot from its audience: empathy for the complicit and forgiveness for the doomed.

Trine Dyrholm, Magnus von Horn and Vic Carmen Sonne at the premiere of ‘The Girl with the Needle’ at the Cannes Film Festival 2024
| Photo Credit:
X/ @Festival_Cannes

“I didn’t want to make a film about Dagmar Overbye,” von Horn says early in the conversation, as if preempting a genre misunderstanding. “Instead, we focused on Karolina’s journey, which is fundamentally human — a struggle for a better life in a very harsh and cruel world. She eventually meets Dagmar and has a similar relationship to her as society did: first believing in her, feeling she was helpful, and then discovering the horrors about her.”

It’s true — the discomfort of The Girl with the Needle doesn’t come from gore (of which there is surprisingly little) but from this quiet erosion of Karolina’s moral compass. Played with devastating precision by Sonne, Karolina is introduced as a desperate woman: her husband is dead, her milk is her only marketable skill, and her options are few and grim. The kind yet unnervingly poised Dagmar offers her a lifeline — room, board, and income in exchange for help with her “adoption business.” It doesn’t take long for the cracks to show, though the horror is more insidious than overt. The key to Karolina’s journey, as von Horn puts it, was “traveling with Karolina into the darkness and finding a way out.”

“I don’t think we ever saw her as simply a victim in the beginning, only to later become more empowered. It’s more complex than that,” Vic chimes in. From the start to the end, she is both, but the situation changes. Through honesty with herself and her connection to a more truthful reality, her autonomy and power become more aligned with something lighter and more truthful.”

A still from ‘The Girl with the Needle’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

The circumstances, of course, are as grim as they come. Post-World War I Denmark is depicted as a purgatory of sorts — crawling out of one catastrophe and unwittingly into another. Industrial progress has brought machines but no mercy, particularly for women, whose lives are dictated by their ability to produce: children, milk, domestic labour.

“We wanted to take the audience on a kind of time travel, and the best way to do that was to draw inspiration from the photography and moving images of the time. That also includes influences from stories that, while not exactly from that period, felt aligned with the world we wanted to create — like Charles Dickens,” Magnus says.

The world Magnus describes is rendered with unflinching detail. Every alley and tenement oozes with soot and despair, and it’s a place on the cusp of modernity, yet deeply regressive. To recreate this world, the director and his team plunged into meticulous research. Cinematographer Michal Dymek drew inspiration from German expressionism, bathing the film in shadows that swallow entire rooms. “We also looked at images from WWI, as the horrors of that time can’t be disconnected from the horrors in our story. The black-and-white images helped us create that time travel,” he adds.

The visual languages of the era permeate every facet of Vic’s performance, with her recalling how she studied the movements of Charlie Chaplin, whose idiosyncratic style perfectly encapsulated the era’s essence. “We wanted to make sure Karolina remained authentic and not be portrayed as a figure from a black-and-white world, to ensure that she felt real and relatable,” she adds.

At the heart of the film is the relationship between Karolina and Trine Dyrholm’s Dagmar. The two women form a bond that’s maternal, manipulative and predatory. Dagmar is both a saviour and a devil, offering Karolina security at the cost of her complicity in unspeakable acts.

“The co-dependency was necessary to tell Karolina’s story, but it was also hard to portray, which made it meaningful and exciting,” Vic says. “I learned a lot from it, though it was difficult, and Magnus and I talked a lot about how one overrides their own emotions to belong somewhere, to feel needed, and to connect with someone. That’s what it means to be co-dependent.”

Despite its period setting, The Girl with the Needle feels disturbingly relevant. The themes of exploitation, power, and complicity are as timely as ever, a point both Magnus and Vic are quick to emphasise.

“Often, we see films as exaggerated or twisted mirrors of our world, whether they’re set in the future or the past. This film isn’t much different, even though it’s set in the past,” Magnus says. “I don’t think the shocking facts about Dagmar Overbye surprised me much, but more the realization that these issues can still connect to the world today. That’s what’s shocking — the fact that, to some extent, things haven’t changed. That’s the scary part,” he concludes

A still from ‘The Girl with the Needle’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

When asked whether Karolina would view her journey with regret, Vic takes a long pause before answering. “I think she would. But, as we said before, looking back a few months from now, she could also see herself as a survivor. I mean, Magnus is sitting in Poland right now, where there’s an abortion ban, and that’s something a lot of survivors are still dealing with today. Some survive, and others don’t.”

Magnus chimes in with his own reflection on Karolina’s arc. “I also think it’s important that she eventually breaks out of that and does something good, even if it scares her. That’s part of her growth, and it makes the story feel like a coming-of-age tale as well as a cautionary one. It’s about her making a deal with the devil, but also, in the end, doing something good.”

By the time you reach the final moments of The Girl with the Needle, you feel as though you’ve been hollowed out, thoroughly absorbed by its lifeless greys. But even as the quiet, gnawing terror of surviving in a world that couldn’t care less about you lingers, there’s still a strange kind of beauty in the gloom — a hopeful kind of beauty. It’s the hope that the duo will carry with them to the Academy Awards in March.

The Girl with the Needle is currently streaming on MUBI