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Interview: Magnus von Horn on The Girl with the Needle

We interview filmmaker Magnus von Horn about his Golden Globe Nominee and EFA-winning film The Girl with the Needle.

Listen to the interview with Magnus von Horn on The Girl with the Needle as a podcast.

Black and white still from the film The Girl with the Needle of a white woman with long dark hair walking up a dark staircase and a still of the director Magnus von Horn whom we interview.
Still from Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle. Top right: Director and co-writer Magnus von Horn whom we interview about his film The Girl with the Needle. Photos courtesy of MUBI.

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“We set out to make this black-and-white film set 100 years ago,” Swedish writer-director Magnus von Horn told me of his new feature, The Girl with the Needle. “When we enter a film like that, we feel we’re fairly safe because this takes place a long time ago, and it’s not even in colour.”

But the world of The Girl with the Needle is a sinister one, where husbands can disappear in the war without a trace, and you can be thrown out of your home or your job with a moment’s notice. In some ways, it’s a world very distant from our own. But von Horn and co-writer Line Langebek find chilling parallels with the present day, where women’s reproductive rights are still under threat and capitalism is no less cruel. It makes for a punishing but rewarding film, one of the year’s hardest watches and also one of its very best.

The origin of the title The Girl with the Needle

The film follows Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne), a seamstress in a factory whose husband has recently disappeared in WWI and left her destitute: the film opens with her being thrown out of her apartment. When she begins a relationship with her boss, who feels for her plight, she soon falls pregnant and finds herself completely alone and jobless, too. Desperate, she arrives at the women’s bathhouse with a needle in tow, ready to abort.

As she begins bleeding profusely from the needle, a stranger, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), intercepts her attempts and cautions her that she could die from this. Instead, Dagmar proposes to help Karoline by finding the baby a new home once it’s born as part of an underground business she runs. Soon, Dagmar takes Karoline into her employ, and the women begin to live together.

But how does Dagmar find new homes for the babies? The story she tells Karoline sounds like a fairytale, especially once we hear it for the second or third time. Indeed, the setup for the film borrows from fairytales: Dagmar is a middle-aged woman, you might say a ‘witch,’ who owns a candy shop, where she lures desperate young women with the promise of help. Dagmar’s home and shop are dark, Gothic spaces. But then, so is the rest of the world. As von Horn explained, “We exaggerated the setting completely, throwing dirt, water, and smoke on the exteriors. We played with perspective a lot in some of the interiors, where we sense it, but we don’t start paying too much attention to it.”

Setting the context for the characters’ stories in The Girl with the Needle

Based on the true crime story of Dagmar Overbye, a Danish woman who helped women like Karoline, The Girl with the Needle is less an indictment of Dagmar than the society that produced her. The film is rich in the details of the precarity of Karoline’s life. She begins the film in a shabby apartment and a tough job but soon loses both: moving to an attic with a massive leak and unreliable gig work that involves hard labour.

This disappearance of her husband in the war is both the cause of her problems and an opportunity: she can trade up with a better suitor. Karoline is always on the lookout for ways to improve her situation, no matter who she might hurt along the way. Just as often, she’s the victim of other people’s ambition, pride, or carelessness. And she’s not the only one. 

Throughout his career, von Horn has told stories of complex people who are often treated as disposable within the society where they live. In The Here After (2015), a whole community is ready to write off a teenage boy for the worst thing he did as a child. In Sweat (2020), a social media influencer is terrified of getting off the treadmill of content production lest she become yesterday’s news, another disposable online icon. Both films were as much about the sometimes unlikable characters as the societies that abandoned them. And the same is true of The Girl with the Needle.

Magnus von Horn previewed The Girl with the Needle for us in our 2021 interview

For von Horn, it all comes down to empathy. In 2021, he told us, “If you show a character as a human, then you stop treating the character as a victim or a perpetrator. If you can love your character, then you will love the good and the bad. I’m really attracted to the dark side, but also to the good side. I like both.“ 

With The Girl with the Needle, von Horn told me, “We wanted to make a film that is on the edge between drama and horror and plays with the audience’s expectations.” Social realist in its concerns and attention to the human drama produced by a cruel society, the film is a heightened period drama that borrows from the conventions of horror. It even explicitly references horror movies from the period. 

Before the film’s North American release, I sat down with Magnus von Horn for an interview via Zoom to discuss how he walked the line between drama and horror in The Girl with the Needle to make a film that’s social realism with a twist. He discusses being inspired by German Expressionism and Batman and crafting a story that is more modern than it might initially seem.

7R: A few years ago, you spoke to Seventh Row about Sweat, and you described your next film as a horror film and a costume drama, which is now The Girl with the Needle. How did you think about the film as a horror film?

Magnus von Horn:  I have always wanted to make a horror film. When I was approached to develop this project, I felt that it had the potential to be a horror film. I never wanted to make a horror genre film but to somehow explore what a horror film is. How can you base it on drama, and always stick to the characters? 

I think genre film is genre because the form and the structure of the film are stronger than the characters within it. That’s when genre wins. But once the characters become stronger than the genre, the genre somehow disappears. So, it’s difficult to call all good genre films genre films because the drama is so strong inside. They become a kind of a mix, like The Shining. I wanted to make a horror film, but to focus on the character and the drama.

7R: How did that affect your thinking about the film’s aesthetic or even the story or the approach for The Girl with the Needle?

Magnus von Horn:  There was this true story of Dagmar Overbye. It’s like a true crime story from Denmark set during the time of WWI, and just after. It was a really horrible story. But when we started researching it, we learned about the society surrounding it, that would cause women to give babies to Dagmar. It says a lot about that society. 

We wanted to make a story with a relatable main character. So we didn’t want to pick Dagmar as the main character. We went into this world of fiction and developed the story of our main character, who is one of the mothers who gives her child to Dagmar. Her story reveals a lot of social aspects of the world she lives in, which puts her in a difficult position which is why she ends up at Dagmar’s place. 

“Those difficult circumstances are also like horror because it’s a horrible world.”

Those difficult circumstances are also like horror because it’s a horrible world. We knew that we didn’t want to make a purely social realist film but to approach that world in a creative way. We were inspired by films made at that time, or images of that time, and trying to recreate that world using elements of German Expressionism, which are like horror movies from the time. 

When we eventually enter Dagmar’s very dark apartment, the film meets horror. We wanted to make a film that is on the edge between drama and horror and plays with the audience’s expectations. It has a different kind of structure, and we don’t know what to expect about where the film will take us. 

Magnus von Horn on a modern approach to period drama The Girl with the Needle

We have to be very aware of what the audience expects when we give them certain things. We set out to make this black-and-white film set 100 years ago. When we enter a film like that, we feel we’re fairly safe because this took place a long time ago, and it’s not even in colour. 

But eventually, the story may not be so far away. It’s more modern in its approach, and all those things are a kind of a game with the audiences to try to tell something in an interesting way. 

The real story it’s based on is about a woman who does this [redacted horrible thing]. But she did it for a reason. That reason starts making sense in a strange way. It’s like, is she the horrible one? Or is society the horrible one? Is the society averting their eyes from real horrors? It creates a very complicated image full of drama, interpretation, and contradictions. 

7R: If the film is an indictment of something, it’s not necessarily an indictment of Dagmar, but of the society around her that produces the conditions that require her. 

Magnus von Horn: Completely. Initially, we said, half jokingly, it’s like when the city of Gotham can’t deal with its crimes, Batman comes — or Joker comes. In this version, Dagmar comes. It’s not so different, except this happened for real. We can’t just call Dagmar a sick woman. She’s part of something bigger, just like you said, the society around her,

7R: People are so disposable in this world. Karoline’s husband just disappears, so she’s planning on trading up husbands. And even when he returns, she throws him out because she has a better option. She gets thrown out of her job so quickly. Your earlier films are also about people who society treats as disposable. 

Magnus von Horn: Yes! It’s great that The Girl with the Needle is set in a world 100 years ago. The world looked different. When you are in this world, when you are thrown out, it’s not like, “I need you gone by the end of the week.” It’s like, “You have five minutes.” It sets up a different mindset, which is a reflection of a harsh world, an oppressive world. When your husband comes back, you throw him out directly. You go for another romance because that’s probably more fruitful in this world. You hope to improve your situation from peeling potatoes in a horrible attic.

It creates a different mindset and different behaviours. Working in this world is fun and provocative because you must think with a different logic. For example, breastfeeding a seven-year-old girl: today, it’s really provocative. But in the universe of the film, it might not be such a strange thing to do. It’s great for her immune system. And the milk needs to keep flowing. 

We can be judgmental about it today if it happened now, but we don’t really have the right to judge them in their society because they lived in a different world. It’s interesting how the world is very different in some ways, but the world is still similar. It’s still us; it’s not so long ago, actually.

7R: How did you walk that line with The Girl with the Needle? Period dramas are always at their core about reflections of society today, even if they’re about the past. 

Magnus von Horn: We need to create a world that feels, on the one hand, extremely credible and realistic, but on another level, it also should feel like a creation and an imagination of the world 100 years ago. 

I always thought Oliver Twist from 1948 by David Lean is such a great film because it has all this strange architecture and this really created world. But it’s also a very social realist story. It mixes very credible acting and this world that feels a bit twisted. I think film loves this contradiction, these contrasts.

But it’s about having a sense of when it’s being exaggerated and when you’re falling off the fence. I built up a good nose for that because we developed the film for so long. We have a good sense of what the DNA of this film is: when it becomes too much and when it’s not enough. 

7R: What did you want to be heightened or exaggerated in The Girl with the Needle? 

Magnus von Horn: It’s many different things. When I was writing or doing prep for the film, I was always listening to electronic music. I always knew I wanted the soundtrack not to be from the time but to have an electronic bass. Now, I see that this makes the film more modern and more connected to the world today. 

Black and white is a way for us to make a credible time journey for the audience by using images that are inspired by the images, films, and photography from that time. When the workers leave the factory in the film, we recreate a frame of a Lumiere Brothers’ film. It’s a way of making the audience travel in time and believe that world. Even if they don’t know that particular image, subconsciously, I believe they feel it. 

I’ve always wanted to build miniatures to use in a film. We built thirty or forty miniatures of buildings and filmed them. We scanned them and added them digitally to the film with VFX. It was a half-analog way of working. 

Magnus von Horn discusses creating a heightened reality without becoming Tim Burton in this interview

When I was working with cinematographer Michal Dymak, it was about being as creative as possible without becoming Tim Burton. For example. the camera should never be able to do completely unrealistic things. That was something we worked on a lot. The camera should not be able to just go and fly through windows and do all this magical stuff. We should treat the world as completely real regarding the camera. 

But the world should not look completely real. We can play with the scenography, but the camera should treat the world as real and not be exaggerated.

The setting is completely exaggerated: we threw dirt, water, and smoke on the exteriors. We played with perspective a lot in some of the interiors, where we sense it, but we don’t start paying too much attention to it. It’s a fine line to walk.

7R: You mentioned playing with perspective in the interiors. There’s sort of a gothic element to a lot of the spaces. 

Magnus von Horn: We built sets for most of the interiors: Karoline’s apartment in the attic, Dagmar’s candy story, Dagmar’s apartment and the back room where Karoline sleeps. We deliberately made the corridors a bit too long and very narrow. There are very, very thick boards for the walls in the back room. It warps the perspective alongside the small staircase. We also used a lot of wallpaper. If you look at the locations we had in colour, they’re all red and green because those are the colours that make for the most interesting blacks and grays. 

We would try to find locations that would also play with perspective and give depth. We wanted a sense of buildings that are a bit crooked, like almost falling over. Any chance we had, we would try to work with that to a certain extent. In the film, there are a lot of VFX shots, but you don’t notice it because you don’t see it.

7R: You shot The Girl with the Needle in the academy ratio. How did that help?

Magnus von Horn: The academy ratio is a 3:2 aspect ratio, which is the aspect ratio of photography at the time. We prepared the film by taking stills in that aspect ratio.  The cinematographer, Michal Dymek, would take stills, and I would act in them. That’s how we do our storyboards. We would always shoot in the 3:2 aspect ratio when we scouted for locations. 

It’s also about using the frame from that time to travel and to use the references of images and films that we know represent that time. But those are not copies of what the world looked like at the time. It’s just other images that someone has very consciously made and taken of the world, which they’ve deliberately framed to look more beautiful or scary than the real world. It’s like a double meta level in this process, which is very inspiring. 

More Magnus von Horn interviews, The Girl with the Needle, and horror

Listen to our podcast on Magnus von Horn’s first two films: The Here After and Sweat.

Listen to this interview with Magnus von Horn on the podcast.

Read our interview with Magnus von Horn about Sweat.

For more films on the border between drama and horror, check out our ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist horror and the struggle for female agency. The book features in-depth studies of films like Personal Shopper, Thelma, and Unsane.

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Ep. 149 The key to great character dramas + The Girl with the Needle (feat. Magnus von Horn)

In this episode of the podcast, Alex Heeney discusses one key element of character dramas (world-building) and how The Girl With the Needle exemplifies this, then talks to director Magnus von Horn about it.

Listen on apple podcasts listen on spotify

Still from Small Things Like These, which Alex Heeney reviews on the podcast
[Read more…] about Ep. 149 The key to great character dramas + The Girl with the Needle (feat. Magnus von Horn)

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The Devil’s Bath is a breathtaking masterwork that will ruin your night and possibly your life

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s harrowing new drama makes their previous chillers, Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge, look like episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Discover more horror films about women in search of their agency amidst patriarchal forces with our ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle For Female Agency”, available here.

A man carries a woman thown over his shoulder as if passed out, through the forest, in a still from The Devil's Bath directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala; Lena Wilson reviews the film The Devil's Bath
Still from The Devil’s Bath directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala; Lena Wilson reviews the film The Devil’s Bath

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Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

As a professional horror movie watcher, I used to pride myself on not being one of those people who couldn’t shake what I saw on the big screen. Nothing I’ve reviewed has ever kept me up at night. And then I watched The Devil’s Bath, the third film from Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.

Although it’s streaming on Shudder, The Devil’s Bath is more historical drama than horror film — and all the scarier for it. God and Satan are omnipresent, but this is no supernatural flick; body parts get lopped off, but this isn’t splatterpunk. This soul-sucking script painstakingly details one woman’s losing battle with societal expectations and depression in 18th-century Austria.

The film opens on a woman who, after commiting infanticide in spectacular fashion, confesses her crime to the authorities. Cut to our protagonist, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), as she celebrates her wedding to a man in a neighbouring village. Agnes is nervous to leave behind everything she knows, but she’s also a nature-loving dreamer excited for motherhood. Unfortunately, her husband, Wolf (David Scheid), seems to prefer the affections of other men, and her mother-in-law constantly criticizes her.

Failing at womanhood in the film The Devil’s Bath

By the standards of her time, Agnes is failing at womanhood, and she can’t seem to do anything to right the ship. Isolated in an unfamiliar town with no allies, she has no resources to improve her situation, nor any outlet for her increasing misery. She is stuck, doomed to feel like a failure, and her religious devotion only intensifies her perfectionistic anguish. When she stumbles on the execution site for the murderess from the film’s opening, Agnes uncovers a sinister loophole. If she commits murder, she can seek death while still being absolved of her sins.

In a way, this shattering film is Ira Glass’s fault. Franz and Fiala say they learned about this dark historical practice, dubbed suicide by proxy, from an episode of This American Life. It’s consummate subject matter for the directing duo, who love to put kids and maternal figures in peril. Their first film, Goodnight Mommy, is a twisted tale of mother-child torture. Their second film, The Lodge, dwells on religious themes, opens with a mother’s suicide, and follows a young wife-to-be through her own psychological demise.

Get our ebook Beyond Empowertainment, which features reviews and interviews about horror films in which women struggle against external patriarchal forces and internal demons.

The Devil’s Bath is a uniquely excruciating, visually exquisite meditation on depression and human brutality. To quote the credits, this movie was “shot on glorious 35mm” by cinematographer Martin Gschlacht and every image is gorgeous. Even the ones you can’t bring yourself to look at. Franz and Fiala pack their frames with lush moss, pitch-black nights, and dark red blood, evoking the beauty and barbarism of nature. Plaschg, who gives a truly incredible lead performance as Agnes descends into insanity, also composed the haunting score. The special effects team deserves a shout-out for lots of impressive — and seriously gnarly — prosthetics.

A fate I wouldn’t wish on even the most odious fictional character

In these picturesque forest villages, people and humans alike are terrorized by a society hundreds of years away from knowing better. You will feel grateful for modern medicine when you see what the village barber tries to do to cure Agnes’ “melancholy.” Prepare to get evangelical about women’s rights after you see how quickly a mismatched marriage could destroy a woman’s life. 

I wouldn’t wish Agnes’ fate on even the most odious fictional character — I wouldn’t even wish it on a gnat or a parasite. As a result, I sort of wouldn’t wish this viewing experience on anyone. If you or someone you love struggles with their mental health, this very well may not be the movie for you. If you seek catharsis in depictions of other people’s struggles, know that this one is especially tough to weather. 

The Devil’s Bath showcases two macabre filmmakers at the very top of their game. It’s an artistic feat, an urgent treatise on mental health and misogyny, and an eye-popping triumph of special effects. But it is also a protracted exercise in dread, as you spend the better part of two hours wondering not if, but when, its sympathetic lead will finally execute her own demise.

Related reading/listening to our review of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s The Devil’s Bath

More horror about patriarchal religion: Read an excerpt from our interview with Rose Glass on her first film, Saint Maud. The full interview is available in the ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle for Female Agency. Inside the ebook, you’ll also find a case study on Joachim Trier’s Thelma. The film is about an evangelical Christian girl with special powers. She struggles to control them when her internalized homophobia clashes with her attraction to another woman.

More women-centred horror/genre films. Read Lena Wilson’s review of Love Lies Bleeding starring Kristen Stewart. Listen to Lena on the podcast where she programmed Jennifer’s Body alongside Sciamma’s Water Lilies.

Get our ebook Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle for Female Agency

Cover of Beyond Empowertainment: Feminist Horror and The Struggle For Female Agency, a great companion reader for fans of The Devil's Bath

Discover a group of psychologically complex horror films about women coping with patriarchy in extreme circumstances. Essays reveal the films’ themes and critically analyze how the films make you feel the way they do. Interviews with the filmmakers’ reveal aspects of the filmmaking you didn’t even know you wanted to be thinking about.

Get your copy of Beyond Empowertainment

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Film Review: Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane

Alex Heeney reviews Caitlin Cronenberg’s directorial debut, Humane, a huis clos horror film set in a near future of highly encouraged assisted death finds a rich family of awful pepole trying to decide who among them to kill.

Still of the Last Supper dinner scene in Caitlin Cronenberg's feature film debut Humane, featuring Peter Gallagher, Jay Baruschel, and Emily Hampshire.
The York Family (Peter Gallagher, centre, Emily Hampshire and Jay Baruschel on the right) sit down for dinner in Caitlin Cronenberg’s directorial debut, Humane. Alex Heeney reviews the film Humane. Photo courtesy of Elevation Pictures.

Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.

Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.

The rise in Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) around the world as a solution to whatever governments don’t want to pay for — disability, aging populations, population growth — is ripe for a horror movie treatment. Caitlin Cronenberg’s debut feature, Humane, is the first film I’m aware of to attempt this, but to mixed results. (Yes, she’s one of those Cronenbergs, sister to Brandon.) By presenting us with heroes we can’t care about and a de facto villain who is the only character with a pulse in the film, Cronenberg keeps a film about a politically charged topic apolitical and hard to invest in. 

A huis clos dinner party gone wrong, Humane is set in a not-so-distant future of food insecurity, harmful sunlight, and climate change disaster. Here, “the government” is encouraging people to “enlist” in assisted death. In exchange for curbing population growth and reducing government spending, “enlisted” people’s families receive a quarter of a million dollars. 

The Last Supper in Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane, reviewed by Alex Heeney

When the film opens, Charles York (Peter Gallagher, in fine form), the Peter Mansbridge of Cronenberg’s vague fictional setting — the film is shot in Toronto, but no country or city is ever mentioned — is gathering his loved ones for a last supper. He’s decided to enlist with his second wife (Uni Park), but none of his four petty adult children, including government advisor Jared (Jay Baruchel, who seems to be in a different movie from everyone else) and despicable CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire), know this until the dinner happens. Just as the children start to squabble about Charles’s shocking revelation, their dinner is interrupted by the bright-eyed government-contracted euthanasia doctor, Bob (a hilarious Enrico Colantoni), who has come to collect his pounds of flesh. 

The children encourage Charles to delay or withdraw from his enlistment. As Jared loves to say — someone who regularly appears on TV to promote enlistment — enlistment isn’t for “people like us.” He means rich people like them. The kind who gather in a gigantic Forest Hill family home to consume gourmet contraband food and count the millions they stand to inherit from the father they don’t care much about. But when Bob takes Charles aside to sign some paperwork, Charles discovers that life might not be worth living as someone going AWOL — especially for a man for whom reputation and money are everything. One little catch: his wife has fled, and once Charles passes, Bob informs the family that he won’t leave until he has another York Family corpse in tow. It’s up to them to decide who to send as tribute. 

An intriguing premise falls short in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane, which we review

It’s an intriguing premise that should provide an opportunity to deconstruct class privilege, family relationships, and how easily we feed people to the wolves when it seems like us vs. them, even if it’s our own family. Working from a script by Michael Sparaga, Cronenberg’s world-building is quite strong as we discover the government machine behind “enlistment.” 

The family becomes quite literally trapped in their house. With internet and phone signals cut off, they can’t access their network of wealth and power to get themselves out of this. When they get to the business of trying to kill each other, a regular occurrence, Bob informs us, they don’t have the necessary medical care when they finally figure out they might be stronger together. Cronenberg and Sparaga achieve all this through a few newscasts at the beginning, brief scenes of the children entering the house, and then dialogue that never feels expositional. She treats everything as unremarkable, letting us spot the strangeness in drips and drabs. We are learning about the hidden intricacies of the program, just as the family is.

A miscalculation in casting and tone in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane

Unfortunately, Cronenberg makes some crucial miscalculations in casting and tone, which render this promising idea hard to care about. To begin with, the entire York family are rich assholes. It’s a nice upending of the tropes of the “government is cruel” film, which so often asks us to hate casually cruel government policies because they affect good people, like the Deserving Poor in I, Daniel Blake. Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa’s brilliant euthanasia film, Plan 75, still falls into the trap of making us angry about the euthanasia program because the person affected by it is a good, lonely person who deserves support. 

Nothing is deserving about the York Family. Cronenberg and Sparaga spend too little time fleshing out the characters before the horror premise kicks in for them even to be three-dimensionally evil. Unfortunately, that means it’s very, very hard to give a fuck who this group of cartoon villains decide deserves most to die. Plus, we already know from the start that their adopted brother Noah (Sebastian Chacon), a person of colour and a recovering drug addict, will be the first and easy target.

Acting styles clash in Caitlin Cronenberg’s Humane, which we review

None of this is helped by the fact that the actors in the York Family behave like they’re in different movies. Jay Baruchel, a Canadian actor who has somehow failed upwards into high-profile Canadian projects after never quite breaking out stateside, is constantly over-acting. He finds endless tics to embellish his character to take over the scene. More often than not, he’s pulling faces that don’t fit with the rest of the cast’s more naturalistic approach.

Unfortunately, Baruchel’s character is the most developed on paper, leaving the other siblings with little to play, so we focus on Baruchel’s from-another-planet performance. Worse, as an ensemble film, almost every scene features multiple actors, one of the absolute hardest things for a director to pull off well, and the scenes fall flat. Yet we never get a sense of the family’s alliances and squabbles, which might complicate this decision. It’s just the bio children vs the adopted one, the richer children versus the poorer ones.

Although I regularly found myself bored with and ambivalent about the York Family, the film comes to life when Enrico Colantoni’s Bob comes on screen. It helps that the character and the actor are the only ones having fun here. But considering the horrifying program that he’s an agent of, Cronenberg risks having us side with the person doing something awful to awful people rather than critiquing the system that encourages people like Bob to take pleasure in watching a family disintegrate — or drawing straws to do it for them.

Humane lacks sharp social commentary for a film whose premise is a politically charged issue

Then, again, I’m not sure Cronenberg’s film has any ambition to provide social commentary about euthanasia programs. The film’s vague setting means there’s no meaningful connection to the very real and problematic euthanasia happening in Canada right now under the MAiD program. The main reference point in the film is a widespread carceral system as in the US, which euthanasia and ‘enlistment’ have since replaced. Bob bemoans that attending to prisoners’ medical needs was more profitable to him personally than merely collecting bodies, which you can only do once per person. 

I don’t think it’s coincidental, either, that the program uses militaristic terminology associated with serving your country for enrolling in the suicide program. The US has much more military culture than Canada. Highlighting American connections and keeping the setting vague suggest that it’s angling for American audiences despite being a Canadian-authored and produced film. The primary nod to the Canadian context is the fact that Bob’s mobile euthanasia service vehicle is filled with boxes labelled “MAiD kits,” which looks like COVID Rapid Test boxes. That’s unfortunate because it removes any teeth the film might have.

Alex Heeney reviews Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane, whose ending is a bit too neat

Although the film acknowledges that euthanasia programs like the one in the film mostly affect poorer people, the film is about the 1%. Initially, this seems like an opportunity to consider the “this could happen to you, no matter how privileged you are, and there’s no way out” consequences of killing your population as a panacea for all of the state’s problems. But not finding a way out amidst that much wealth and privilege is unrealistic. It would also be structurally unsatisfying for a film that positions Bob and the government as the villains and a hack as the solution. 

That’s not to say there’s no body count or that the Yorks don’t suffer, just that neither they nor we care much about who the casualties are. It makes the result predictable and allows Cronenberg to avoid any real political stand. Considering her film is about a crucial issue that is only ramping up in the worrisome ways it’s being applied but still not yet widely discussed in fiction, it’s a missed opportunity and a disappointment.

Related reading/listening to our review of Caitlin Cronenberg’s film Humane

More on Medical Assistance in Dying: Read our review of Chie Hayakwa’s Plan 75. Read our interview with Chie Hayakawa on making a film about euthanasia.

More Horror/Genre Films by Women: Read our review of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding and our interview with Glass on Saint Maud. Read our review of South African horror film Good Madam.

More Horror: Get our ebook on feminist horror films, Beyond Empowertainment. The book looks at a spate of horror from the 2010s, featuring interviews with filmmakers and essays on the films.

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Film Review: Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers

Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is part ghost story and part romance, and it feels like a warm hug.

Read our extensive writing on and interviews with Andrew Haigh and his team.

Get our ebook on Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete, available here

Still from Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers starring Andrew Scott (left) and Paul Mescal (right). Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.
Still from Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers starring Andrew Scott (left) and Paul Mescal (right). Photo courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

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“They say it’s a very lonely kind of life,” comments Mum, who may be a ghost or a figment of Adam’s imagination. She looks the same as the day she died thirty plus years ago. Her fortysomething son Adam (Andrew Scott) has just unexpectedly come out to her, and she’s worried about him. “They don’t actually say that anymore,” Adam angrily rejoins. “Everything’s different now.” But when he goes over it again later that night in bed with his paramour Harry (Paul Mescal), he revises that statement to something less defensive and a little more true: “Things are better now. Course they are. But it doesn’t take much to make you feel like you felt back there again, skin all raw.” 

It could be the thesis statement of writer-director Andrew Haigh’s heartrending and healing film All of Us Strangers, which collapses the distance between past and present by offering Adam the opportunity to visit with his long-dead parents, Mum (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell), back in his childhood home. Denied his childhood as both a queer boy in the 1980s and an orphan at age twelve, Adam still carries the trauma of being accidentally abandoned by his parents, who died when he needed them most, and the fear that they would have left him anyway had they known who he was. The wounds may be old, but they still feel fresh, and they’re getting in the way of Adam living a fulfilling life.

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When the film opens, we watch screenwriter Adam spend his days alone inside his windowless high-rise apartment (an apt metaphor for his hermetically sealed emotional life). He’s trying to write but mostly just eating junk food while watching bad TV. A fire alarm drill — the sound of the alarm itself a portentous warning — leads Adam to discover there’s one other person living in his eerily quiet building, Harry. That night, Harry turns up drunk, depressed, and uninvited at Adam’s doorstep, and comes on (strong) to Adam. Harry is reaching out for some care and comfort: “There are vampires at my door.” But Adam shuts the door in his face because he’s afraid of the vampires at his door and is worried Harry might be one of them. After all, it wasn’t long ago that a doorbell signalled his parents’ death and inviting your queer lover in was a dangerous pursuit — not that opening your heart to someone ever stops being scary.

The visit triggers Adam to start thinking about his parents and the screenplay he wants to write about them. He peers down through his window at the train tracks below, and suddenly, he’s on a train back to his hometown, and then looking at his childhood home. He can hardly believe his eyes: he has to compare the building to the old photograph he has, still hidden behind vellum, like a world he can’t access. Appearing out of nowhere in a thicket in a local park, a man younger than Adam beckons Adam to follow him. It’s a nod of the head which, in this secluded setting, seems like it could be cruising,mirroring the introduction of Harry which was through a hookup invitation. When he brings Adam home to meet his wife, Adam’s Mum, we realise the man is Dad.

At the end of Adam’ s first evening with his parents, we see Adam in closeup, standing at the back of the frame, marvelling that he got his parents back, sandwiched between his parents, who are dancing in silhouette at the front. He can’t stop smiling: he has his parents back, and they’re reminding him what love, in all its forms, can feel like. When Adam returns to his apartment that night, he finally has the courage to invite Harry in. 

Gaining confidence from Harry and his parents

Haigh observes how each interaction and revelation Adam has with his parents triggers a newfound confidence to pursue a relationship with Harry, whose quiet acceptance further pushes him to demand what he needs from his parents. The scenes between Adam and his parents and Adam and Harry mirror each other, too. For Haigh, we seek from our lovers what we didn’t get from our parents, and we rely on our parents to prepare us for love. It’s why Dad and Harry, especially, are intrinsically linked, not just by their Northern accents, mustaches, and wardrobes, but in their gestures of care and touch and saying what Adam desperately needs to hear.

When Harry first shows up at Adam’s door, he’s holding a bottle of Japanese whiskey to share; when Dad invites Adam over, he first stops to buy hard liquor for the evening. After visiting his mother in the pouring rain and having to uncomfortably change clothes in front of her, Adam returns home to Harry who draws him a bath, offering to close his eyes when Adam becomes shy about removing his clothes even though they’ve already had sex. Adam often has the same conversation with a parent as he does with Harry. The second time around, he’s able to be more honest and nuanced.

Adapting Taichi Yamada’s novel

Haigh adapted All of Us Strangers from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers. Keeping the basic premise and structure, Haigh largely dispenses with the book’s horror elements. It’s still essentially a ghost story about a haunted house that Adam initially doesn’t want to leave and then is terrified he won’t be able to get back into. But Haigh avoids declaring the parents are indeed ghosts and barely leans into the Gothic horror tropes this could so easily invite. By making the story closer to home — set in present-day London with a gay protagonist — All of Us Strangers is, unlike the book, explicitly and necessarily about the changing social context of Adam’s life since his parents’ death, and it’s all the more emotionally resonant for it.

Adam’s parents are frozen in time with the same bodies, hairstyles, clothes, and social mores as they had in the 1980s. When Adam comes out to his parents, it’s like returning to that time again because they respond as if they’re still in it. For them, discovering their son is gay means learning he’ll have a life as a second-class citizen, unable to express affection in public without legal recourse, let alone unkind public scrutiny, and he’ll be unable to marry or have children. In England, you couldn’t even have sex if someone else was in the building. And if you did have sex, you were very likely to get AIDS and die. As Adam explains to Mum, none of that is true anymore.

The film is partly about reconciling the fears and feelings from that time, which never fully went away, with the better world Adam finds himself in. When Adam comes out to his mother and later his father, almost every line is punctuated with a long pause, which often underlines or contradicts what is said. “So you’re not lonely?” asks Mum, trying to understand what being gay means for her son. “If I’m lonely,” he explains, “It’s not because I’m gay. Not really.” She repeats his “not really,” highlighting how much work that little caveat is doing: it is and it isn’t the reason.

Delicate, pared-down dialogue

Haigh’s delicate, pared-down dialogue invites these Pinter pauses and is a gift to the actors: every syllabic emphasis takes on meaning. It draws attention to the simple phrases of care and interest that the characters repeat: “Are you OK?”, “Are you sure?”, “What’s wrong?”, “You’re OK”, “Why?”. As someone terrified that his parents wouldn’t have wanted to know the real him and sad that they never got the chance, it’s exactly what Adam needs to hear from a parent or a partner long before Mum, Dad, and Harry spell out everything else. 

A warm embrace

Most of Adam’s encounters with his parents (and Harry) feel like a warm embrace. Dad, even more than mum, bends over backwards to show the affection he couldn’t when he was alive. Bell plays Dad as quietly bursting with excitement at Adam’s return and desperate to tell him how proud he is. He’s constantly finding ways to hold Adam’s arm or offer an unexpected wink or kiss. It’s as if he felt he’d already lost Adam, or was going to, well before he died. Adam’s encounters with his parents are all the more comforting because of the way they aren’t: his parents still act like real, flawed people with lives offscreen and the power to hurt him. But it’s always tempered with his parents’ enthusiasm to offer love and compassion. They may falter, but they course-correct quickly, as if they have thirty years of hindsight.

Mum and Dad are often shot throughout to tightly sandwich Adam in the frame. I was convinced there were dozens of hugs between Adam and his parents in the film, but there’s only one incredible hug to make up for all the ones he didn’t get. And in the scene before he gets it, the edge of Bell’s arm wraps around the frame Adam’s in, as if already embracing him. Likewise, Harry’s presence often envelopes Adam in the frame. Leaning over Adam in the bathtub, Harry’s body spans the frame; to hold Adam in bed, Harry’s arm reaches across the entire frame.

There’s a lot of actual handholding, too, both physical and emotional. Not only do Mum and Dad find their way to comforting Adam, but he must comfort them in their worries about his life and the effects their mistakes had on him. Before Mum delivers the blow, “They say it’s a very lonely kind of life,” we cut to a closeup of her hand grasping Adam’s. He can’t deal with this unintentionally cruel comment, so he wrenches his hand away to calm down enough to help her handle the news. But they make up for it later by touching hands in the film’s longest uncut scene, after Adam climbs into her bed, dressed in his now too-small childhood pyjamas. When Adam finally sends off his parents and then Harry, it’s by holding their hands and then his body.

All of Us Strangers feels surreal without fully leaning into genre

There’s often a surreal quality to even the early scenes with Mum and Dad, even as they always feel real, which, for Mum, is the most important barometer. On Adam’s first night with them, Mum and Dad reminisce, their faces and bodies shot in shallow focus fragments, while Adam is always separate in a closeup. In a possibly dreamed scene where adult Adam gets into bed with his parents, Haigh’s refusal to cut works like a special effect, uniting Harry and Adam’s parents in the same room, an impossibility, in a scene about Adam’s fear of losing them all.

In the film’s second half, a drug trip turns into a waking dream or nightmare: time loops in on itself, and the real and imagined are increasingly indistinguishable. Getting your parents back is a balm, but coping with losing them all over again when you still haven’t said and heard all the things you need to is a struggle.

Part boy, part man

“You were just a boy, and now you’re not,” Mum exclaims to Adam. But Scott’s Adam seems like a boy one minute and an adult the next, thanks to Scott’s tremendous performance and Haigh’s always superlative direction. There are subtle shifts in Scott’s physicality that make him look decades younger, like when Scott hops into his parents’ bed and curls himself up into a ball with his fists at his head. In one scene, he petulantly claps his hand over Dad’s mouth as if stopping him from saying something will prevent it from coming true.

Haigh’s blocking and Scott’s position in the frame can also make Adam seem childlike. When Adam relives his final Christmas with his parents, Scott is seated while his parents decorate the tree, emphasizing their height differences. In closeup, Foy flits her eyes down toward him, as if to a small boy, to confirm he understands she’s effectively singing him an apology by singing along to the Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind.” Sometimes, it’s just about him feeling small. When Adam comes out to his father, Dad holds court in a reverse shot where his chair and body encompass 90% of the frame, with Adam only visible from behind at the edge of the frame. It echoes Harry’s remark that Harry feels like he’s at “the edge of [his] family”.

Avoiding heteronormative cliches

When I interviewed Andrew Haigh in 2021, he talked about the challenges of creating queer stories, especially romantic ones. “If you’re making those films, you’re rebelling against the traditional, heteronormative narrative, but you’re also sort of playing into it, as well. It’s very, very difficult to get it right. Because then, you feel like, well, I have to have some kind of happy ending, don’t I? Or should I not have a happy ending? If I don’t have a happy ending, what does that say?”

We were ostensibly talking about Weekend and its legacy, which ends with the boys changed for the better by their two-day relationship but parting ways forever. But I know now that Haigh would have already been working on, but had yet to shoot, All of Us Strangers. We were probably talking about it, too. He was wrestling with how to tell a queer story that doesn’t fall into heteronormative traps. And in All of Us Strangers, he finds a perfect solution: a hopeful tragic ending that earns its sentimentality by simultaneously subverting it.

All of Us Strangers is a transformative film 

In Haigh’s second feature, Weekend (2011), orphan Russell must satisfy himself with coming out to his paramour Glen cosplaying his dad while lying in bed. In Looking (2014—2016), on which Haigh served as showrunner and principal director, Dom can only come out to his dead father by driving by his graveyard and shouting, “I’m gay,” unable to actually locate his gravestone. Arguably, Patrick in Looking spends the entire series coping with the unsatisfactory coming out experience he had with his parents which has also prevented him from accepting himself. All of them are looking for love, but none of them fully find it (except, perhaps, in Looking: The Movie).

In All of Us Strangers, Haigh gives Adam the real thing: a satisfying coming out story with parents who know they’ve screwed up and are sorry for it, who accept their queer son thirty years too late but soon enough that he can still change his life (harder for the couple visited by a ghost in Haigh’s 45 Years), but whom he can’t keep. Like Glen in Weekend, Harry isn’t a forever love, but he offers Adam a deeply tender, casually domestic, relationship — the kind not previously afforded to Haigh’s less mature and younger characters.

Mum, Dad, and Harry all teach Adam to be braver, to demand to be treated better, to care for himself, and ultimately, to care for others. Adam begins the film unable to extend a hand to a suffering man in need because he’s too caught up with and terrified by his own pain and loneliness. He ends the film able to put his feelings aside to provide comfort and care for his parents and then Harry, and by extension, himself. Finally, everything’s different now for Adam.

Listen to our podcast on Andrew Haigh’s Weekend

Related reading/listening to Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers

More Andrew Haigh: Read our review of 45 Years and interview with Haigh on 45 Years. Read excerpts from our ebook on Lean on Pete, including our interview with Haigh. Read our interview with Andrew Haigh on the 10th anniversary of Weekend. He also reflects on telling queer stories more generally, which applies to All of Us Strangers.

Listen to our Andrew Haigh podcasts. In one of our earliest episodes, we discuss Lean on Pete (2016) and why we wrote a book on it. Listen to us compare Haigh’s Weekend to the Argentinian queer romance End of the Century. Listen to our episodes on Haigh’s TV work in HBO’s Looking and the BBC’s The North Water.

Discover all of our LGBTQ+ coverage here.

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Fantasia Film Review: Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die

Alex Heeney reviews Stéphan Castang’s film Vincent Must Die works like a zombie film, where anybody could become a zombie at a moment’s notice — and not the slow-moving kind.

Read more reviews from the Fantasia Film Festival.

Vincent (Karim Leklou) in Stéphan Castang's Vincent Must Die. Photo courtesy of Cannes Critics Week.
Vincent (Karim Leklou) in Stéphan Castang’s film Vincent Must Die, which Alex Heeney reviews. Photo courtesy of Cannes Critics Week.

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Horror is often at its best when comedy, scares, and tragedy intersect. It’s true of Fantasia-selected short film Good Condition. And it’s especially true of zombie films like Night Eats the World, and Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die. While waiting for a meeting to begin, Vincent (Karim Leklou) makes a sneering comment to an intern. The intern responds by violently stabbing him. It’s a horrific moment that’s also laugh-out-loud funny. 

HR has ways of easily dispensing with an intern who attacks a stand-up employee. But the next day, his colleague attacks him. Immediately afterwards, the colleague is in remorseful tears, unable to explain his behaviour. Soon, it seems, everyone is out to get Vincent. Did Vincent ask for it, or is something more sinister going on? Castang never quite answers that, but certainly the violence is always a disproportionate response. 

Soon, Vincent notices that the attacks begin with eye contact. All he has to do is never look anyone in the eye, and he should be safe. But that proves difficult and lonely. He winds up isolated, miserable, and constantly afraid of every mild-mannered person he encounters. When he discovers he’s not the only on battling unprovoked violence, he wonders if it’s some kind of virus. 

Finding connection when everyone is out to get you in the film Vincent Must Die, which Alex Heeney reviews

Vincent Must Die is at its best when dealing with the minutiae of what happens when anybody might try to kill you. Is it truly possible to isolate yourself? The result is sometimes grotesque, like a burst septic tank that can’t be fixed because repair people can’t be trusted. What if you fall in love, or think you could? Watching Vincent and his paramour navigate courtship, given he’s a magnet for violence, is both tender and funny. A sex scene hinges on finding somewhere to comfortably handcuff his partner should she get a different kind of urge from looking at him. Sometimes, the horror and comedy intersect, like when Vincent tries to explain to his unconvinced romantic partner that he really is a target by heading to a department store to see what chaos ensues.

Stéphan Casting’s film Vincent Must Die works like a zombie film

Vincent Must Die essentially works like a zombie film, where anybody could become a zombie at a moment’s notice — and not the slow-moving kind. At some point, the entire society seems to have devolved into extreme violence. Is it just the new norm, violence begets violence, or a sign that Vincent’s troubles are the result of being infected by a virus which has since found more hosts?

I like that we don’t know how Vincent may have become ‘infected’, and that more and more people become ‘infected’ from unknown sources. At the same time, people start magically recovering, no longer unintentionally courting violent outbursts. Yet the strain of having lived under constant fear of other people has destroyed their lives and relationships. 

A poorly thought-out virus metaphor in the age of COVID-19

The trouble is, it’s hard not to draw real-world connections in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic from a multi-organ damaging virus.Using a virus as a plot device in a post-2019 world feels lazy and deliberately blinkered. It’s not so much escapist or heightened, but somehow cut off from reality. I know there’s massive amounts of COVID denial as the current threat it is. But I kept waiting for Vincent Must Die to deepen, to find insights into the last four years that never came. 

MORE: Read about exceptional horror films about women’s agency. Read reviews from the Fantasia Film Festival. Listen to podcasts on our favourite horror films.

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