I'm not normally a fan of the Lars Van Trier school of miserable films where everything is bleak and terrible, yet I can sometimes appreciate the sentiment. von Horn's The Girl With the Needle is a beautifully shot film that explores a woman forced to confront something truly horrible even after being pushed to desperation. She, and us as the audience, are given somewhat of a hopeful ending despite wrestling with the question of whether this world is redeemable or not. I'm just not sure the film makes a successful case for this final bit of optimism.
The Girl With the Needle asks us how we can justify the lives of innocents when we create a world that is so patently unjust. When we know humans will suffer how do we justify allowing life to exist in suffering. But it doesn't quite get to asking us to have a responsiblity to alleviate the conditions of suffering, instead asking us whether we should allow life at all. It sets this up through what is essentially a thought experiment along the lines of the trolley question. It creates a villain who does horrible things but then it allows her to argue for her position and perhaps even makes us sympathetic to her argument. Despite this very heavy handed premise, The Girl With the Needle ends with an ambiguous answer. Is it responding by saying the suffering is worth it, or that the answer presented by its villain is unfair. It will give us much to wonder about as we attempt to scrub what we have seen from our memories.
As a movie it mostly works. von Horn uses a stark black and white cinematography that evokes the horror of a different age, and combines this with the photographic style of that age such as characters looking into the camera as they did in the silent era, and lit menacingly as they often were. This creates an uncomfortable aura which matches the story's tone and chills us as the audience, an audience confronted with our own complicity. It is brilliant to watch but the plot is a bit plodding. There are multiple powerful moments even from the get go, which make Karoline's painful reality feel strikingly real, yet there are also stretches that feel drawn out. In all of this I'm not sure the ending is earned. The hope almost feels a bit outside of what has happened before it and isn't connected to how characters acted in the first act.
Still, The Girl With the Needle with haunt you, truly asking you to deal with something terrible, humanity's real cruelty. I'm not sure the ending gives enough hope to make the rest of the film's bleak assessment of human beings forgivable.
The Girl With the Needle/Pigen Med Nålen
Starring: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm
Director: Magnus von Horn
Writers: Line Langebek, Magnus von Horn
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