In Denmark, most people know at least the basic facts of the horrifying true story that makes up the backbone of the new film, The Girl with the Needle.
Between 1915 and 1920, a Copenhagen woman, Dagmar Overbye, offered to take on unwanted babies for a fee, telling the mothers they were going to a good home. Instead, she murdered them. Overbye was eventually caught and sentenced to death in 1921.
Screenwriter Line Langebek and director Magnus von Horn didn’t want to simply tell the story of a serial killer in their film, which is now available in the U.S. via MUBI and is Denmark’s Oscar submission in the international film category.
“What she did says so much about society surrounding her at the time,” von Horn says. “She didn’t kidnap babies to kill them. Women came to her and gave her babies. We wanted to try to tap into that world.”
So Overbye, played by Trine Dyrholm, doesn’t appear until about halfway into the film, which is shot in striking black and white.
Instead, the narrative focuses on Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a factory worker in the wake of World War I who is impregnated by her rich boss and then discarded after his mother disapproves. Overbye discovers Karoline at a Copenhagen bathhouse attempting to give herself an abortion with a needle, and offers her an alternative solution. For a fee, Overbye promises to find an adoptive family. After Karoline gives birth she relinquishes the baby to Overbye, but instead of simply going their separate ways Karoline latches onto this mysterious older woman who seems to be doing good deeds. Thinking her own child is living a more comfortable new life with a wealthy family, Karoline becomes an aid to Overbye and they develop a twisted co-dependency.
The real Overbye was suspected of killing up to 26 infants, and convicted of killing 8. Her motive was financial: She collected money from mothers at their wits end who trusted her to find a good home for their children.
A fairy tale based in fact
Karoline is based on the woman who ultimately brought the police to Overbye’s door, wanting her baby back. Von Horn and Langebek took creative license with her story, and now have Karoline spend more time with Overbye before she is caught. When the Karoline of the film comes back to Dagmar’s door she is sucked into Overbye’s orbit, becoming a wet nurse for her. Van Horn likens the film to a “fairy tale.”
“Eventually she questions: is she becoming Dagmar or not,” von Horn says. “How does a normal person end up almost becoming a doppelganger or an apprentice that’s going to take over.”
Von Horn and Langeback did extensive research that included retrieving the 122 page transcript of the Overbye court case from the National Danish Archives and reviewing images of the stove where police found the bones of the babies liked by Overbye. The photographs, which von Horn describes as haunting, informed the production design. But the co-writers were also interested in details about the world that produced someone like Dagmar. Copenhagen in the post-WWI years was crowded and people could easily disappear. For more information on that, they turned to historian Pia Fris Laneth.
“It’s the way she explains how she disposed of bodies, and how she got rid of babies just shows how no one cared about what they saw floating by in the river or something being thrown in a waste basket,” von Horn says.
Following the war, Denmark introduced a system of numbered identification for its citizens, making it a lot harder for people to just vanish, Langeback says.
“That became in a way part of the tapestry,” she says.
Disturbingly human
The version of Overbye that appears on screen is much older than the real woman. Dyrholm is in her 50s while Overbye was in her 30s when these events took place. She also was a compulsive liar who was less organized than Dyrholm’s portrayal. However, as is depicted in the film, she did suffer many miscarriages, and ultimately had a daughter. The Girl with the Needle portrays that girl as a blonde moppet named Erena (Avo Knox Martin) to whom Karoline becomes a surrogate mother.
The screenplay encourages audiences to see the parallels between the impoverished Karoline and Overbye who hustles for a living, even if that means committing unthinkable crimes. Thus, it makes Dagmar more disturbingly human.
“There a different version of this story where Dagmar’s just a monster, but that’s the story of the serial killer that we all know,” Langeback says.
And yet starting and ending the film with Overbye did not feel “morally defendable” to von Horn.
“There is something psychopathic about that we can’t deny about Dagmar,” he says. “Making a story where she’s the main character, you would always be at a distance.”
To that end, The Girl with the Needle ends on a moment of optimism for both Karoline and Overbye.
“It would not have made sense unless Karoline finds a way to use these dark spirals of oppression and violence and to somehow find a way to change that energy into something positive,” von Horn says. “She keeps fighting to change her own life and eventually she does something also for someone else.”
