‘The Girl with the Needle’ interview: Magnus von Horn and Vic Carmen Sonne on their Oscar-nominated Danish thriller

Magnus von Horn and Vic Carmen Sonne dissect the complexities of their film ‘The Girl with the Needle’, loosely inspired by the heinous crimes of Danish serial killer, Dagmar Overbye

By the time The Girl with the Needle premiered at Cannes, it was already draped in whispers of morbid curiosity. Billed as a historical psychological horror film, it lured audiences with the promise of a post-war true crime and the gothic expressionism that Robert Eggers was soon to reimagine in the same year, only to lock them in a suffocating embrace. The film follows Karolina, a wet nurse in 1919 Denmark, who unwittingly becomes entangled with a real-life baby farmer — a later euphemism for a serial killer specialising in infants. The singular cinematic experience, loosely inspired by the heinous crimes of Dagmar Overbye, is a dark fairytale dipped in arsenic and regret that has landed director Magnus von Horn his first Oscar nomination and marked Vic Carmen Sonne’s most searing performance to date.

In the aftermath of the film’s Oscar nomination among this year’s international heavyweights and Best Picture contenders, including Emilia Perez and I’m Still Here, as well as fellow Cannes alum The Seed of the Sacred Fig, I find the actress and filmmaker reflective yet still humming with the adrenaline of their festival summer, and energised by the response to their work. Together, they dissect the complexities of their film, which asks for a lot from its audience: empathy for the complicit and forgiveness for the doomed.

“I didn’t want to make a film about Dagmar Overbye,” von Horn says early in the conversation, as if preempting a genre misunderstanding. “Instead, we focused on Karolina’s journey, which is fundamentally human — a struggle for a better life in a very harsh and cruel world. She eventually meets Dagmar and has a similar relationship to her as society did: first believing in her, feeling she was helpful, and then discovering the horrors about her.”

It’s true — the discomfort of The Girl with the Needle doesn’t come from gore (of which there is surprisingly little) but from this quiet erosion of Karolina’s moral compass. Played with devastating precision by Sonne, Karolina is introduced as a desperate woman: her husband is dead, her milk is her only marketable skill, and her options are few and grim. The kind yet unnervingly poised Dagmar offers her a lifeline — room, board, and income in exchange for help with her “adoption business.” It doesn’t take long for the cracks to show, though the horror is more insidious than overt. The key to Karolina’s journey, as von Horn puts it, was “traveling with Karolina into the darkness and finding a way out.”

“I don’t think we ever saw her as simply a victim in the beginning, only to later become more empowered. It’s more complex than that,” Vic chimes in. From the start to the end, she is both, but the situation changes. Through honesty with herself and her connection to a more truthful reality, her autonomy and power become more aligned with something lighter and more truthful.”

The circumstances, of course, are as grim as they come. Post-World War I Denmark is depicted as a purgatory of sorts — crawling out of one catastrophe and unwittingly into another. Industrial progress has brought machines but no mercy, particularly for women, whose lives are dictated by their ability to produce: children, milk, domestic labour.

“We wanted to take the audience on a kind of time travel, and the best way to do that was to draw inspiration from the photography and moving images of the time. That also includes influences from stories that, while not exactly from that period, felt aligned with the world we wanted to create — like Charles Dickens,” Magnus says.