Pigen med nålen
Pigen med nålen (The Girl with the Needle), Denmark/Poland/Sweden 2024. Directed and written by Magnus von Horn.
Metropol Phantom Theater, Row 1, Seat 3. Original version w/ subs.
(This post also appears at my Letterboxd account.)
Sadly, and I’m certainly in the minority, I don’t think Magnus von Horn’s 2024 Pigen med nålen is a good movie. On the positive side, it unlocks new dimensions of bleakness; Hoffmeier’s score is fantastic; and Dymek’s cinematography—with a full-frame sensor ARRI Alexa Mini LF—is ridiculously good. He almost imprisons the actors inside the movie’s already crammed 1.50:1 format, reminiscent of Nykvist’s frames-within-frames cinematography, and creates depth-of-field shots that almost seem like magic.
However.
I never expect art house movies to follow the Syd Field paradigm or variations thereof, that’s perfectly okay. But Pigen med nålen has no plot, only a story where fresh horrible things happen every twenty minutes. Then, instead of dramatic development, there’s only a relentless misery buffet, at the tail end of which the movie’s “revelation” has merely the impact of a sixth or seventh helping. Whereby this “revelation” isn’t a revelation at all to boot—the “real event” the script claims to be “inspired by” is too well-advertised to surprise anyone, and is even slightly misleading since around two-thirds of the movie go by before it’s introduced at all. What’s more, there’s no character development, except when counting the somewhat saccharine second half of the denouement-ish ending that feels as unwarranted as it feels unconvincing. Finally, beyond a broad declaration that everyone is suffering and everyone is cruel all the time, the script piles way too manic topics from that misery buffet on its plate to approach anything like thematic focus.
Regrettably, the two other elements listed on the positive side also have drawbacks attached to them. The movie isn’t shot on black-and-white film but digitally, and—despite Dymek’s supreme cinematography—it very subtly shows. (If they had to do it in digital, it’s curious why they didn’t use the ARRI Alexa Mini LF’s Monochrome version, the result of which would have been really exciting to see—but maybe shooting commenced before that version came out in early 2023, or they didn’t want to work with a rental exclusive.) And as to Hoffmeier’s incredible score, it often feels as if it had entered the set by mistake, and that it would have been a spectacular fit for a different movie.
Finally, on a historical note, the script’s contrivance that the main character’s husband comes back disfigured from the war, and that another character wanted to serve but wasn’t allowed to because of his important war production role, is screamingly outrageous unmitigable nonsense. Last time I checked, Copenhagen isn’t and wasn’t situated in Northern Schleswig, where the only Danes lived that took part in the First World War, and they were forced to do so as part of the German army.
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