Review: In ‘The Girl With the Needle,’ women face unthinkable options — and a dark solution

Karoline is utterly alone in Copenhagen. “The Girl With the Needle,” Denmark’s official submission for the international feature Oscar, is directed and co-written by the Swedish Polish filmmaker Magnus von Horn. It doesn’t announce itself as such, but it is a film about one of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers, Dagmar Overbye, a child caretaker convicted in 1921 for murdering nine babies. For Von Horn and his Danish co-writer Line Langebek, what’s important about Dagmar’s story isn’t Dagmar herself, but the social context that birthed her heinous crimes and the hypothetical women who might have found themselves in Dagmar’s dark embrace, like Karoline. “The Girl With the Needle” makes for a thematic trio with two other international features this year: “The Devil’s Bath” from Austria and Italy’s “Vermiglio,” period pieces about women suffering under oppressive patriarchy, where there’s no room for error, particularly when it comes to pregnancy.