On the planet of Danish true crime, one title looms giant over all the remaining: 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.
Because the nation’s first feminine serial killer, Overbye is now a family title in Denmark. However director Magnus von Horn and screenwriter Line Langebek Knudsen believed that the general public hadn’t regarded previous the salacious headlines and engaged with the substance of Overbye’s life. That led them to make “The Woman with the Needle,” Denmark’s official Oscar submission that gives a fictionalized retelling of a real story that hasn’t misplaced an iota of topicality.
“I learn in regards to the story in a guide my dad had that was ‘Well-known Danish Crime Instances.’ I used to be fascinated by this girl who killed all these infants. However she was a product of her time, this was earlier than we had reproductive rights. Girls didn’t have equal rights. Dagmar very a lot operated in that point,” Knudsen mentioned throughout a current dialog with IndieWire, explaining that she noticed the movie as a possibility 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 many issues we talked about fairly early on was this sense ‘There however for the grace of God go I.’ What would you do when you had been of their sneakers? In the event you had that little cash, when you labored in that manufacturing facility, when you had been compelled to dwell in these sorts of flats?”
Fairly than a traditional true crime story, “The Woman with the Needle” is a extremely expressionistic black-and-white saga that follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a Danish manufacturing facility 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 surprising being pregnant. Her disaster leads her to satisfy Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), and he or she begins working with the adoption company earlier than being sucked into the authorized troubles that finally result in Overbye’s downfall.
“We actually simply needed to be impressed by the information or the historic information,” von Horn mentioned when requested in regards to the option to construct the movie round Karoline quite than Dagmar. “We didn’t need to make a biopic about Dagmar, so we began searching for a essential character that we might relate to emotionally and go on a journey along with. And that’s when Karoline got here up, which is a really fictionalized character. So the problem, and what was attention-grabbing, was methods to use Dagmar as an inspiration as somebody the primary character lastly comes to satisfy and finally ends up having a relationship with and ultimately escapes from. However that additionally turns into a mirrored image, I feel, of society’s relationship to Dagmar in a method.”
The movie eschews conventional dramatic constructions, unfolding episodically at a leisurely tempo whereas Karoline struggles to maintain her life from fully derailing. Her first encounter with Overbye doesn’t even come till midway via the movie, an intentional creative alternative that permits von Horn to simulate the best way that girls in disaster would naturally encounter the serial killer of their every day lives.
“I consider it as being true to life in a method. To not suppose a lot about movie construction, however quite to consider how there’s sort of dramatic construction to our lives. How in life we come to sure factors and abruptly issues change and it doesn’t have the three-act construction as movies,” von Horn mentioned. “It’s a simplified model of our lives. However when you consider an inner story of a essential character, you could find I feel a movie construction which may be very a lot based mostly on a rhythm and a tempo that’s extra true to life as we all know it and never as movie life or tales. Karoline was working in a manufacturing facility, she finds a possibility she tries to make use of to get a greater life that fails, then one thing else occurs. It places her in a unique place on this world. She meets completely different individuals. They don’t essentially need to return to the story.”
“The Woman with the Needle” options among the yr’s most putting imagery, with exactly composed photographs 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 dressing up drama, being in black and white, it brings a sort of a distance and a sense of security for the viewers. ‘Oh, it came about a very long time in the past. We’re secure.’ Throughout the course of the movie, you’re feeling okay, the movie comes nearer and nearer, which is a part of the sport with the viewers,” he mentioned. “However that distance to start with made us suppose, okay, let’s create this world. Let’s make it aesthetically enticing. Let’s actually think about poverty. Let’s be impressed by the fairy tale-ish side of this world.”
The director isn’t shy in regards to the topicality of his subject material, citing restrictive new abortion legal guidelines in his dwelling nation of Poland as proof that the ethical questions that dominated Overbye’s trial have stay as current as ever in public life. However he famous that audiences in 2024 would haven’t any bother relating a narrative about girls who really feel helpless amid surprising pregnancies to their very own lives. That prompted him to lean away from realism and political commentary, opting to embrace visible cues from horror motion pictures and different works of German expressionism with the hope that a long way from actuality would make his movie extra timeless and approachable.
“We needed to verify the movie didn’t simply grow to be a social lifelike movie. We even thought that we might most likely make a recent adaptation of this theme, might make it in coloration, set it perhaps in the present day,” von Horn mentioned. “However I feel that nobody would need to watch it. It could be too horrible.”
A MUBI launch, “The Woman with the Needle” opens in choose theaters on Friday, December 6 earlier than ultimately streaming on the platform.