In a pre-feminist age, Karoline is what entirely too many people would call a “fallen woman.” Alone, unemployed and pregnant by a man not her husband, she is acknowledged only to be punished, and invisible for all remaining purposes. Women like Karoline don’t fall of their own accord. They’re dropped, often from a great height, by a ruling patriarchy that doesn’t even care to watch them splatter. That involuntary descent, to not just a grimy gutter but a near-Hadean underworld of human cruelty, is the chief horror in “The Girl With the Needle,” Magnus von Horn’s extraordinary and upsetting film — an adult fairytale abundantly populated with witches and wretches, but where society is revealed as the true monster.
Von Horn’s previous feature “Sweat,” a selection for the scrapped 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, offered a very different study of femininity bending over backwards to meet societal standards.
Von Horn’s previous feature “Sweat,” a selection for the scrapped 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, offered a very different study of femininity bending over backwards to meet societal standards.
- 5/15/2024
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Magnus von Horn’s sophomore feature Sweat earned its director a spot in Cannes’ Official Selection in 2020, after his debut, The Here After, played in Directors’ Fortnight in 2015. But the festival of 2020 was canceled in the wake of the Covid pandemic, so von Horn’s place in this year’s Competition, with his third feature The Girl With the Needle, must surely mark the Swedish director’s coming-of-age. The film, starring Vic Carmen Sonne and Trine Dyrholm, riffs on one of Denmark’s most notorious murder cases to weave a poetic and dark fairytale about the people living on the margins in the aftermath of the First World War.
Dyrholm stars as Dagmar Overbye, the Danish serial killer convicted of murdering nine children — but suspected of many more deaths — between 1913 and 1920. One was her own; the others were handed to her by struggling mothers with babies born out of wedlock,...
Dyrholm stars as Dagmar Overbye, the Danish serial killer convicted of murdering nine children — but suspected of many more deaths — between 1913 and 1920. One was her own; the others were handed to her by struggling mothers with babies born out of wedlock,...
- 5/15/2024
- by Joe Utichi
- Deadline Film + TV
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska makes her English-language debut with The Silent Twins, the strange and remarkable story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who only communicated with each other from 8 to later-teen years when drugs and drinking led to petty theft and an arson charge that landed them in the tightly secured medical ward of Broadmoor for 11 years before being released in the 1980s. Creating their own puppetry and dolls, poems and music, which they only broadcast for each other on a fake radio program, the “twinnies” as they were called by family fell into an odd void that became more pronounced, even when they were forced to go to separate schools at one point. And they carried on this way until becoming young women landing and in legal trouble until incredibly being incarcerated for over a decade, five or six times as long as the...
- 5/25/2022
- by Pete Hammond
- Deadline Film + TV
Offering a different kind of near-future dystopia, “Warning” lets the clock run out on humanity’s stint in the background, while in the foreground we examine ways technology might usurp our lives in the guise of “improving” them. This first feature for music video director Agata Alexander, credited as “a film by” producer Cybill Lui Eppich, is a refreshingly offbeat series of faintly interlocking stories that hang together better than most omnibus-type constructs.
This is sci-fi cinema of a relatively subtle, intriguing stripe, without the usual emphasis on fantastical or action imagery. Still, it’s slickly engaging enough to please more open-minded genre fans, and brainy enough to attract those who want something other than another laser shoot ’em up. Lionsgate is releasing the Poland-shot, English-language production to limited U.S. theaters as well as digital and VOD formats on Oct. 22.
David (Thomas Jane) is a lone maintenance man working...
This is sci-fi cinema of a relatively subtle, intriguing stripe, without the usual emphasis on fantastical or action imagery. Still, it’s slickly engaging enough to please more open-minded genre fans, and brainy enough to attract those who want something other than another laser shoot ’em up. Lionsgate is releasing the Poland-shot, English-language production to limited U.S. theaters as well as digital and VOD formats on Oct. 22.
David (Thomas Jane) is a lone maintenance man working...
- 10/21/2021
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
“Sweat,” which is screening at the Rotterdam Film Festival and the Göteborg Film Festival this week, has attracted additional sales, New Europe Film Sales has reported. The film, which was selected by Cannes last year, had been previously been sold widely.
Magnus Von Horn’s “poised, impressive drama,” as it was called in its review in Variety, has been acquired by One from the Heart in Greece; First Hand Films in Switzerland; Capella Film for Russia and Cis; and Blue Swan Entertainment for Italy, San Marino and Vatican.
As previously announced, Arp acquired French rights; Curzon took U.K./Ireland; Mubi took U.S., Latin America, India and Turkey; while other sales included Rialto (Australia/New Zealand), Elamedia (Spain), Scanorama (Baltics), Demiurg (ex-Yugoslavia), Imagine (Benelux), Mozinet (Hungary), and Mer Film (Norway).
The film tracks Polish fitness guru Sylwia – who has 600,000 Instagram followers and no friends – across a three-day whirl of professional engagements,...
Magnus Von Horn’s “poised, impressive drama,” as it was called in its review in Variety, has been acquired by One from the Heart in Greece; First Hand Films in Switzerland; Capella Film for Russia and Cis; and Blue Swan Entertainment for Italy, San Marino and Vatican.
As previously announced, Arp acquired French rights; Curzon took U.K./Ireland; Mubi took U.S., Latin America, India and Turkey; while other sales included Rialto (Australia/New Zealand), Elamedia (Spain), Scanorama (Baltics), Demiurg (ex-Yugoslavia), Imagine (Benelux), Mozinet (Hungary), and Mer Film (Norway).
The film tracks Polish fitness guru Sylwia – who has 600,000 Instagram followers and no friends – across a three-day whirl of professional engagements,...
- 2/5/2021
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
The selfie mode has two faces in “Sweat,” a hard, glistening study of life on the hamster wheel of Instagram celebrity, in which influence and inconsequence aren’t quite the opposites they seem. Swedish writer-director Magnus van Horn’s aggressively accomplished sophomore feature takes as its subject an outwardly easy target for satirical character study — young, sexy, relentlessly self-promoting Polish fitness guru Sylwia, who has approximately 600,000 followers and precisely zero friends — and follows her across a draining three-day whirl of professional engagements, personal crises and social media updates that fall somewhere in between. At first, the result yields the exact damning insights you’d expect from a portrait of this performative, image-oriented lifestyle, before some welcome conflict seeps in via Magdalena Koleśnik’s tricky, tightrope-walking tour de force in the lead.
Arriving five years after von Horn’s debut “The Here After,” a solemn troubled-youth study that made a strong...
Arriving five years after von Horn’s debut “The Here After,” a solemn troubled-youth study that made a strong...
- 12/31/2020
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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