Cannes 2024: The Young Woman with a Needle, what horrors (review)

In competition for the Palme d'Or, this black and white Danish true crime is weighed down by its sordid craftiness.

At the Cannes Film Festival, we demand, year after year, films that take us, turn us around, eat us and spit us out completely washed out on the Croisette. Seems like that's the cinematic lens of The Young Woman with the Needle, judge for yourself: in Denmark in 1918, a young worker (Vic Carmen Sonne, intriguing) abandoned by her husband lives in poverty, has sex with the factory boss who makes her pregnant before dumping her, her husband returns disfigured of the war, she throws it away, she tries to have an abortion with a needle in the public baths… Don't panic! She is saved by a kind confectioner (the always brilliant Trine Dyrholm) who will lead her into a strange child trafficking business. It is “inspired by real events”we learn from the end credits.

Shot in extremely careful black and white with nightmarish, almost industrial ambient music (signed by musician Frederikke Hoffmeier alias Puce Mary), the film mixes atrociously sordid details and dreamlike flights of fancy, clearly aiming to evoke both Katie Tippel thatElephant Man. But Magnus Von Horn has neither the energy of Verhoeven nor the vision of Lynch. We much prefer the charming The Mysteries of Barcelona, true crime Belle époque cobbled together in black and white, released (and unnoticed) in fall 2022 here. The Young Woman with the Needle possesses even less the strength of Lars Von Trier of the great era – that of Breaking the Waves or Dancing in the DarkCannes films that took us, turned us around, ate it up and spit it out. The Young Woman with the Needle works like a villainous vampire, who seems to know very well what he is doing to shock his audience. In short: where to plant the needles.

The Young Woman with the Needle by Magnus Von Horn, with Vic Carmen Sonne, Trine Dyrholm, Besir Zeciri… No French release date yet.