The Girl With the Needle

critic Reviews

, 93% Certified Fresh Tomatometer Score
  • Threading its grim tale through sumptuous black-and-white photography, The Girl with the Needle is a haunting parable made with superb craft.
  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Tara BradyIrish Times
    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.

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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Michael O'SullivanWashington Post
    Sonne delivers a twitchy performance, lurching from meek withdrawal to rage.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Richard WhittakerAustin Chronicle
    Its answers are uneasy and disquieting, and the true root of its horror.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Christy LemireFilmWeek (LAist)
    It is so exquisitely well-crafted but such a downer and hard to watch.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Danny LeighFinancial Times
    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. 
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Wendy IdeObserver (UK)
    It’s a remarkable film: bleak, but horribly compelling.
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Mauricio Jarufe CaballeroCinencuentro
    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]
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Sebastian Zavala KahnCinencuentro
    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].
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  • , Rotten Tomatometer Score
    Elsa Fernández-SantosEl Pais (Spain)
    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]
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  • , Fresh Tomatometer Score
    Sergi SánchezFotogramas
    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]
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