In the world of Danish true crime, one name looms large over all the rest: Dagmar Overbye. Between 1913 and 1920, Overbye operated a fraudulent adoption agency that claimed to find homes for babies without parents able to care for them — but she secretly killed the children that were placed in her care. She was estimated to have murdered between 9 and 25 infants and was sentenced to death in a high profile murder trial in 1921.
As the country’s first female serial killer, Overbye is now a household name in Denmark. But director Magnus von Horn and screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen believed that the public hadn’t looked past the salacious headlines and engaged with the substance of Overbye’s life. That led them to make “The Girl with the Needle,” Denmark’s official Oscar submission that offers a fictionalized retelling of a true story that hasn’t lost an iota of topicality.
“I read about the story in a book my dad had that was ‘Famous Danish Crime Cases.’ I was fascinated by this woman who killed all these babies. But she was a product of her time, this was before we had reproductive rights. Women didn’t have equal rights. Dagmar very much operated in that time,” Knudsen said during a recent conversation with IndieWire, explaining that she saw the film as an opportunity to offer a more nuanced look at the economic and social factors driving Overbye and the women who turned to her. “One of the things we talked about quite early on was this sense ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ What would you do if you were in their shoes? If you had that little money, if you worked in that factory, if you were forced to live in those types of flats?”
Rather than a conventional true crime story, “The Girl with the Needle” is a highly expressionistic black-and-white saga that follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a Danish factory worker who struggles to keep her head above water. She hopes that marrying her boss will provide her an economic lifeline, but those plans are thwarted by an unexpected pregnancy. Her crisis leads her to meet Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), and she begins working with the adoption agency before being sucked into the legal troubles that ultimately lead to Overbye’s downfall.
“We really just wanted to be inspired by the facts or the historical facts,” von Horn said when asked about the choice to build the film around Karoline rather than Dagmar. “We didn’t want to make a biopic about Dagmar, so we started looking for a main character that we could relate to emotionally and go on a journey together with. And that’s when Karoline came up, which is a very fictionalized character. So the challenge, and what was interesting, was how to use Dagmar as an inspiration as someone the main character finally comes to meet and ends up having a relationship with and eventually escapes from. But that also becomes a reflection, I think, of society’s relationship to Dagmar in a way.”
The film eschews traditional dramatic structures, unfolding episodically at a leisurely pace while Karoline struggles to keep her life from completely derailing. Her first encounter with Overbye doesn’t even come until halfway through the film, an intentional artistic choice that allows von Horn to simulate the way that women in crisis would naturally encounter the serial killer in their daily lives.
“I think of it as being true to life in a way. Not to think so much about film structure, but rather to think about how there is kind of dramatic structure to our lives. How in life we come to certain points and suddenly things change and it doesn’t have the three-act structure as films,” von Horn said. “It’s a simplified version of our lives. But if you think of an internal story of a main character, you can find I think a film structure which is very much based on a rhythm and a pace that is more true to life as we know it and not as film life or stories. Karoline was working in a factory, she finds an opportunity she tries to use to get a better life that fails, then something else happens. It puts her in a different place in this world. She meets different people. They don’t necessarily have to return to the story.”
“The Girl with the Needle” features some of the year’s most striking imagery, with precisely composed shots that give the film a painting-like detachment from reality. Von Horn explained that he intentionally leaned into the period production value as an audience immersion technique.
“Being a costume drama, being in black and white, it brings a kind of a distance and a feeling of safety for the audience. ‘Oh, it took place a long time ago. We are safe.’ During the course of the film, you feel okay, the film comes closer and closer, which is part of the game with the audience,” he said. “But that distance in the beginning made us think, okay, let’s create this world. Let’s make it aesthetically attractive. Let’s really imagine poverty. Let’s be inspired by the fairy tale-ish aspect of this world.”
The director isn’t shy about the topicality of his subject matter, citing restrictive new abortion laws in his home country of Poland as evidence that the moral questions that dominated Overbye’s trial have remain as present as ever in public life. But he noted that audiences in 2024 would have no trouble relating a story about women who feel helpless amid unexpected pregnancies to their own lives. That prompted him to lean away from realism and political commentary, opting to embrace visual cues from horror movies and other works of German expressionism with the hope that some distance from reality would make his film more timeless and approachable.
“We wanted to make sure the film didn’t just become a social realistic film. We even thought that we could probably make a contemporary adaptation of this theme, could make it in color, set it maybe today,” von Horn said. “But I think that no one would want to watch it. It would be too horrible.”
A MUBI release, “The Girl with the Needle” opens in select theaters on Friday, December 6 before eventually streaming on the platform.
