The Girl With the Needle

Magnus von Horn's The Girl With the Needle (Danish: Pigen med nålen) competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2024 and was one of the most discussed European releases of the year. It was selected as Denmark's official submission for the 97th Academy Awards in the Best International Feature Film category and made the December 2024 shortlist of fifteen, although it did not advance to the final five.

The film is loosely based on the real case of Dagmar Overbye, a Danish woman convicted in 1921 of multiple murders connected to an illegal child-care service she ran in Copenhagen during and immediately after the First World War. The case is one of the most studied in Danish criminal history and has been the subject of academic monographs and a small number of earlier dramatic treatments. Von Horn's screenplay, co-written with Line Langebek, focuses on a fictional protagonist drawn into Overbye's circle rather than on Overbye herself.

The film is shot in 35mm black-and-white by Michał Dymek (who had shot von Horn's earlier Sweat), with the visual style frequently compared to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath and to early Bergman work. The cast is led by Vic Carmen Sonne, with Trine Dyrholm in a major supporting role and the breakthrough performance of Besir Zeciri. Von Horn — Swedish-born but Danish-trained — has worked principally in Polish-language productions through the 2010s; The Girl With the Needle is his first Danish-language feature and the project that established him as one of the major Nordic art-cinema directors of his generation.