The Girl With the Needle

The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.


Sonne delivers a twitchy performance, lurching from meek withdrawal to rage.

Its answers are uneasy and disquieting, and the true root of its horror.

It is so exquisitely well-crafted but such a downer and hard to watch.

Working in pin-sharp black and white, director Magnus von Horn brings icy clarity to the tale of an ordinary young woman, Karoline, whose misfortune is vast in pitiless times. 

It’s a remarkable film: bleak, but horribly compelling.

Unlike other European art-house films, this is a film with agile editing, tight sequences, a certain paranoid tone reminiscent of German Expressionism, mid-century Gothic, and some echoes of Eastern European cinema of the 1960s...[Full review in Spanish]

More terrifying than any commercial horror film, the film develops dread and tension through situations that frequently occurred in Western societies at the beginning of the 20th century and that could still happen today. [Full review in Spanish].

Despite Dymek's exquisite work and a good happy ending, Von Horn's film fails to confront the horror it depicts; rather, on the contrary, it only exalts the cruelty of what happens on screen. [Full review in Spanish]

The power of Magnus von Horn's film is measured in the tension between the expressionist photography, in pristine and elaborate black and white, and the boundless sensationalism that runs through its plot...[Full review in Spanish]