Presented at the Cannes Film Festival, Magnus von Horn’s picture is a total cinematic masterpiece – guided by a sure hand, told with panache, spectacular and penetrating at the same time. ‘The Girl with a Needle’ is the best Polish film of 2024.
This time, the Swedish-Polish director takes us to Copenhagen at the end of the 1900s. World War I is underway in the West, but life in Denmark is also a daily struggle for survival. Here, in one of the largest factories, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), along with hundreds of other women, sews uniforms for the army. Her husband is long lost at the front, and the single woman cannot afford to rent the apartment where they spent their previous years. When the dark-haired seamstress enters into an affair with the heir to an industrial fortune and becomes pregnant, she faces a series of morally difficult choices.
In telling her story, von Horn does not try to build a thread of understanding between the heroine and the audience. He consciously eschews narrative devices that would allow us to identify with Karoline, empathise with her or justify her. Although the camera does not leave the protagonist’s side for a moment, the director does not show on screen the moments in which she makes her next difficult choices. He does not depict her hesitations, does not explain her rationale, but throws the viewer into a situation in which a decision (usually a bad one) has already been made, and Karoline – like the audience – confronts its consequences. For in a world of poverty, exploitation and the daily struggle for survival, choice does not exist – there is only the need to save oneself.
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A still from the film The Girl with the Needle, dir. Magnus von Horn, 2024, photo: Gutek Film
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By setting the story at the end of the second decade of the 20th century (and drawing on short stories – including Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Söderberg, the iconic turn-of-the-20th-century Scandinavian writer), von Horn creates a painfully blunt picture of capitalist reality. Here, human life is worth very little, and desperate people huddle at the doors of factories hoping for a job that will pay for a corner to sleep in and a basic meal (there is a wonderful scene reconstructing the Lumière brothers’ Exit of the Factory Workers). In this thoroughly mercantile world, the rich exploit the poor, and interpersonal relationships are marked by brutality and constant competition.
Von Horn dresses this tale in beautiful formal attire. The Girl with the Needle is, in this sense, a complete cinematic work in which all elements – from the set and costumes to the music, editing and cinematography – work towards a common artistic goal. Thanks to Jagna Dobesz’s production design, the open-air locations of Kłodzko and Łódź are transformed into the Copenhagen of World War I, while Małgorzata Fudala’s costumes contribute to the vision of a dark world steeped in grime. The cinematography by Michał Dymek is also masterful – the black and white frames inspired by Witkacy’s photographic works look here like ‘smoky’ photographs from a century ago. If, after Skolimowski’s IO, anyone still had any doubts that the 33-year-old Dymek is one of the most outstanding Polish cinematographers, The Girl with the Needle certainly dispels them.
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A still from the set of The Girl with the Needle, dir. Magnus von Horn, 2024, photo: Łukasz Bąk/Gutek Film. Pictured, from left: Tine Dyrholm, Magnus von Horn, Vic Carmen Sonne.
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Also impressive are the acting performances that carry von Horn’s film. Playing the main character, Vic Carmen Sonne has a naivety and innocence that makes the film’s cruelty (experienced and inflicted by Karoline) all the more unbearable. But the truly brave performance here comes from Trine Dyrholm, an outstanding Danish actress known for her appearances in films by Susanne Bier and Thomas Vinterberg. In von Horn’s film, she plays Dagmar, a woman who offers to mediate adoptions for pregnant women in difficult situations. Despotic and compassionate, cold and sensitive – her character is a conglomeration of contradictory emotions that probably only Dyrholm can combine into a coherent whole.
This is also what von Horn’s film is like – ruthlessly cool and stunning in its visual beauty, told with extreme precision and yet without feeling calculated. The Girl with the Needle is not only the best Polish film of 2024, but also a true artistic event that is increasingly rare in domestic cinema.
The Danish-Polish-Swedish co-production was Denmark's official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, where it was nominated for the Oscar for Best International Feature Film.
- The Girl with the Needle. Directed by: Magnus von Horn. Screenplay: Magnus von Horn, Line Langebek. Cinematography: Michał Dymek. Editing: Agnieszka Glińska. Production design: Jagna Dobesz. Costumes: Małgorzata Fudala. Music: Frederikke Hoffmeier. Performers: Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri, Joachim Fjelstrup, Tessa Hoder.
