THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE may have benefited from a different title, different expectations.
Like last year, my 2024 TIFF journey was marked by many a Best International Film Oscar submission. I've already written about some of them, including contenders from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Palestine, and Portugal. Now, as this protracted post-festival coverage reaches its end – got to move on to NYFF at some point – let's consider the official submissions from Denmark and Bulgaria. The Cannes-competing The Girl with the Needle from Magnus von Horn, and the TIFF-premiering Triumph by Petar Valchanov and Kristina Grozeva dramatize shocking true stories that prove Lord Byron was right. Truth really is stranger than fiction…
THE GIRL WITH THE NEEDLE, Magnus von Horn
Faces on faces, a nightmare of light in the dark. That's how The Girl with the Needle opens, an early surge of black-and-white abstraction in which actors have other visages projected onto them, defamiliarizing the features, sometimes showing an emotion their physical expression denies. It's a distorting and disturbing salvo, but it sets the stage for a dark story ahead. Magnus von Horn's third feature follows Karoline, a seamstress in 1910s Copenhagen, who struggles to survive in the absence of her husband who went off to war and disappeared without a trace. Her plight earns the woman sympathy in the eyes of Jørgen, the factory owner for whom she works.
Tall as the tallest tree, he stands out in the forest of women workers, a looming presence of patriarchal noblesse oblige. Watching him seduce Karoline is an obscene spectacle, made more so by how much her helplessness seems to get him going. By Christmas, he's dressing her in the finest frock, all sparkle and rough gold-spun lace – it's wrapping rather than fashion, making her into a gift for him. By New Year, he's gotten her pregnant. But the chasm of their class difference prevents marriage, so Karoline is dismissed from his world of shiny surfaces, fired from her job, and consigned to a damp, mold and mildew-ridden hovel.
The grayscale cinematography by Michal Dymek does much to exult those spotted patinas and nauseating textures. He immerses you in the haptic realities of Karoline's daily struggle, while careful composition and the lack of color pull the spectator back. The strange dance of closeness cum alienation becomes more apparent when the seamstress' husband shows up, half his face gone, ready to be rejected by her and then taken back in once new fortunes prove false. Even covered in transformative effects, Besir Zeciri delivers a remarkable performance as the traumatized soldier, giving us access to his interiority in ways Vic Carmen Sonne never does with Karoline.
But that's not entirely her fault. The Girl with the Needle may peer close into its protagonist's eyes, but it stops itself from getting close to her, if that makes sense. There's nary narrative interest in Karoline beyond her pain, and the picture barely considers who she might have been in a pre-World War I existence. The most we know of Karoline is her hardness, how despair becomes like calloused skin around her heart, smothering it but never quite killing the impulse for compassion. Then again, and spoilers ahead, The Girl with the Needle isn't Karoline's story. She's only the pretext to get to von Horn's true protagonist – real-life serial killer Dagmar Overbye.
As soon as Trine Dyrholm steps into The Girl with the Needle, when Dagmar helps Karoline during a failed abortion at the public baths, you feel a shift in the film. It's as if a blurry image suddenly came into focus, sharp and gruesome, wearing a smile that promises good but delivers horror. She's a baby broker, you see, using a candy shop as front for the real business of taking newborns from their dispossessed mothers and getting them new homes among the childless middle and upper classes. It all comes for a price, of course, and Karoline has no funds to spare. So, she becomes a milkmaid, feeding the babes that come and go from Dagmar's house while the older woman's daughter suckles on the breast every night to keep the flow steady.
Between the lascivious attention paid to the hell spawn's hunger and how Karoline's body becomes a product, a narcotized plaything for a queered-up version of Overbye, The Girl with the Needle reveals itself an exploitation flick donning a paper-thin mask of prestige. And that's before Karoline witnesses the fate of the babies themselves, suffocated and dumped like garbage by the same woman who once proclaimed women have to help each other, a saint who was a demon all along. It's an ugly film, alright, befitting the realities it portrayed. Yet, the camera's focus on the drama's obscenities, the awkward interlacing of fiction with fact makes for much disquiet – not necessarily in a good way.
Magnus von Horn's formalist control keeps the project from slipping down the drain into meritless misery porn, but one yearns for the radical empathy of Sweat, the director's previous and best feature. Perchance, it wouldn't feel so unbalanced if Karoline was simply excised from the story. Make The Girl with the Needle into "The Woman with the Stroller," since that's what the finished product feels like anyway. Oh well, unimpeachable craft – overegged score aside – will have to do in the face of dubious narrative impulses, a movie as an endurance test for those seated in the movie theater. One thing's for sure, however.
When Overbye takes the stand to defend herself, Dyrholm knocks it out of the park and delivers the film's mission statement while at it: "The world is a horrible place but we must believe it isn't so." Von Horn dispels this illusion but prizes it just the same, wishing it were real. Ultimately, it almost seems like he values optimism above the putridness he just presented. It's no coincidence that The Girl with the Needle ends in kindness, a fortified love that goes beyond logic, and a gesture that would read ambiguous if not for the music announcing a miracle from the heavens above. Despite the cruelty, the story demands mercy, from the world and the audience, too.
TRIUMPH, Petar Valchanov & Kristina Grozeva
In the post-Soviet Bulgaria of the 1990s, a secret military operation is underway. Guided by the psychic Pririna, General Zlatev has been going around the country unearthing massive stones that should bring forth direct communication with some extraterrestrial entities. The future of humanity is at stake, or so the devout think, believing in whatever the potential charlatan tells them. Pirina's words are golden, and she has blessed another with their glow. She's Slava, the daughter of Colonel Platnikov, and according to the older woman, the lass is a powerful signal conductor. Meaning, she waves her arms around and points where to dig.
There's much talk of fantastical happenings, yet the camera is a skeptic throughout, perceiving the people's absurdity rather than justifying their conviction. Detached framing does a lot of work, but so do the actors, whose taste for the grotesque and willingness to look a fool must be commended. Maria Bakalova is especially impressive as Slava, going for innocence without falling into condescension for her character. When the girl's self-image collapses or when she asserts her strength over Pirina's paranoia, the Oscar nominee uncovers new dimensions to Slava, hinting at complexities that may exist beyond the camera's purview, the narrative's limits.
Through her work, one can find the sincerity within Triumph's satire. Look beyond the mundane free-falling into lunacy, and you may glimpse the portrait of a country unmoored by historical movements, in search of a solution to its ills. One waiting outside the reach of realism, existing only in the eyes of those with faith. Not in terms of organized religion, mind you, but faith in the impossible, in something that exists above us and transcends the real. It might help us, guide us toward the path of some self-same transcendence. Triumph is about hope, the madness of grasping it, coveting its warmth past the point of reason.
But, of course, earnestness is married to scornful humor in the conjugal context of Triumph. The quality is most apparent in the editing, how it privileges dry, unbelieving reaction shots as punctuation to its highest eccentricities. And yet, Valchanov and Grozeva want to have their cake and eat it, too, maintaining a sense of ambiguity in their portrayal of the psychics. Pirina comes off like a manipulative entity, fully aware of her grift. Only, some moments flirt with earnestness. They come from textual cues and mostly leave Margita Gosheva unmoored, tasked with playing contradicting ideas that amount to characterization-nullifying nonsense.
Slava's journey is, at least, a tad more functional, in part because it delineates a little bildungsroman on the side of Triumph's pseudo-historical romp with sci-fi aspirations. Waiting for a spaceship like Beckett's vagabonds waited for Godot, the young woman discovers new sides of herself, including surges of carnal desire, the ardent need for autonomy in the face of paternal protectiveness and the operation's whole circus. Undecided, lost in ambiguity that breeds ambivalence, Triumph stumbles its way to a hollow conclusion, full of unexpected fire and fury to spark some excitement where there was nothing but apathetic bemusement.
Bakalova's presence might put more eyeballs on Triumph, but, from this pair, The Girl with the Needle seems to be the likeliest finalist. Do you agree?