In the world of Danish true crime, one identify looms massive over all the remainder: Dagmar Overbye. Between 1913 and 1920, Overbye operated a fraudulent adoption company that claimed to seek out houses for infants with out dad and mom capable of take care of them — however she secretly killed the kids that had been positioned in her care. She was estimated to have murdered between 9 and 25 infants and was sentenced to demise in a excessive profile homicide trial in 1921.
As the nation’s first feminine serial killer, Overbye is now a family identify in Denmark. But director Magnus von Horn and screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen believed that the general public hadn’t seemed previous 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 provides a fictionalized retelling of a real story that hasn’t misplaced 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 mentioned throughout a current dialog with IndieWire, explaining that she noticed the film as a chance to supply a extra nuanced take a look at the financial and social elements driving Overbye and the ladies 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 traditional true crime story, “The Girl with the Needle” is a extremely expressionistic black-and-white saga that follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a Danish manufacturing unit employee who struggles to maintain her head above water. She hopes that marrying her boss will present her an financial lifeline, however these plans are thwarted by an sudden being pregnant. Her disaster leads her to fulfill Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), and she or he begins working with the adoption company earlier than being sucked into the authorized troubles that finally result in Overbye’s downfall.
“We really just wanted to be inspired by the facts or the historical facts,” von Horn mentioned when requested in regards to the option to construct the movie round Karoline reasonably 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 movie eschews conventional dramatic buildings, unfolding episodically at a leisurely tempo whereas Karoline struggles to maintain her life from utterly derailing. Her first encounter with Overbye doesn’t even come till midway by means of the movie, an intentional inventive alternative that enables von Horn to simulate the way in which that ladies in disaster would naturally encounter the serial killer of their day by day 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 mentioned. “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” options a number of the 12 months’s most putting imagery, with exactly composed pictures that give the movie a painting-like detachment from actuality. Von Horn defined that he deliberately leaned into the interval manufacturing worth as an viewers immersion method.
“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 mentioned. “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 in regards to the topicality of his material, citing restrictive new abortion legal guidelines in his house nation of Poland as proof that the ethical questions that dominated Overbye’s trial have stay as current as ever in public life. But he famous that audiences in 2024 would haven’t any hassle relating a narrative about girls who really feel helpless amid sudden pregnancies to their very own lives. That prompted him to lean away from realism and political commentary, opting to embrace visible cues from horror films and different works of German expressionism with the hope that far from actuality would make his movie extra 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 mentioned. “But I think that no one would want to watch it. It would be too horrible.”
A MUBI launch, “The Girl with the Needle” opens in choose theaters on Friday, December 6 earlier than ultimately streaming on the platform.
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