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In this episode of the podcast, Alex Heeney discusses how she got interested in Indigenous films from Australia, which led her to recommend Ivan Sen’s Limbo as one of the best films of 2024.
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.
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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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We interview filmmaker Tarsem Singh about his self-funded epic film The Fall (2006), which has been newly restored in 4K for a streaming premiere on MUBI worldwie on September 27. Singh discusses the film’s divisive response, a years-long battle to release the film, and its passionate cult following.
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It’s difficult to talk about Tarsem Singh’s The Fall without addressing the extraordinary story of its creation. Back in the 2000s, Singh had a long-gestating passion project he couldn’t get funded. It was the story of a hospitalized young Romanian girl, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), in 1920s Los Angeles. She meets injured stuntman Roy (Lee Pace), who tells her a fantastical story about five men on a quest to take down an evil Governor who rules their world. At the time, Catinca Untaru was an eight-year-old Romanian girl who had never acted before (and hasn’t starred in a feature since; Lee Pace was a relatively unknown actor as his breakout role in Pushing Daisies was still to come.
After years of development and rejection, Singh decided to make it himself. With a successful career as a director of commercials, music videos, and one prior feature (2000’s The Cell), Singh spent all his money to fund and produce The Fall. This process took over four years and bankrupted him with its $30 million budget.
The structure of The Fall required Singh to take an unconventional approach to filming. The film cross-cuts between scenes at the hospital, where Roy tells Alexandria his epic tale, and Roy’s story as Alexandria imagines it. There was no script for those fantasy sequences. To keep Untaru’s performance as natural as possible, Singh had her and Pace improvise their scenes together. After filming the hospital scenes, Singh spent years filming the fantasy parts shaped by those improvised scenes.
To pull off the grand saga of Roy’s story, Singh filmed across 24 countries, from deserts to castles, tropical islands to world monuments, and more. Sometimes, Singh made savvy use of his commercial jobs to ensure he would get the footage he needed; when he had to film a commercial in an exotic locale that could work for The Fall, he would hold the crew back for several days to fly out his film’s cast and shoot what he needed.
The final result is the sort of personal, singular filmmaking that’s rarely executed on such a large scale. Untaru’s and Pace’s strong, naturalistic performances keep the emotions foregrounded, while Singh makes full use of his skills at stylish image-making to create gorgeous, colourful visuals with the help of cinematographer Colin Watkinson and costume designer Eiko Ishioka.
While the stunning imagery evokes the childlike wonder of its protagonist, Singh takes The Fall’s story to dark and tragic places that make it more suitable for adults. Singh’s eccentric blend of tones is all his own because no one else would invest in it. Every second of The Fall is a risk, a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence of an artist realizing their vision with immense resources and no outside input. This makes it all the more exciting when Singh’s risks succeed.
Unfortunately, The Fall’s struggles didn’t end after it pulled off the feat of merely existing. It premiered in 2006 at the Toronto International Film Festival, where critics panned the film and distributors wouldn’t touch it. The Fall finally got a North American release in 2008, partly thanks to the support of directors like Spike Jonze and David Fincher. It gained a small but passionate following.
But over the years, the film has languished. Its home video release went out of print, and it was never available to watch via streaming. Singh, who retains the rights to the film he calls his baby, worked on a 4K restoration only to find that companies he pitched a re-release to, like Criterion, weren’t interested. Luckily, arthouse streamer MUBI came to the rescue, announcing that the new 4K restoration of The Fall would get a near-global release on its platform this year.
I spoke to Tarsem Singh several hours before the restoration had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. With less than ten minutes to discuss a film with decades of history behind it, Singh was affable and excited to discuss The Fall, the changes he made for this new release, and what it means for a new generation of people to discover his film as it makes its streaming debut.
Tarsem Singh: You ask the right question because most people ask why I feel it was so tough to make this movie. And I say, “No, that’s the only way this movie could have been made.” That was never the battle.
I wasn’t ready when we brought it to Toronto and not a single person would take it, even for free. They would not release it. I’d spent all my money [from] 20+ years of working in really lucrative business and advertising, made the movie, and nobody wanted it.
I had to work for another two years to get it out in a handful of cinemas so that some fan base would develop and people would remember it. And still, nobody would pick it up 20 years later.
So it was great that a friend introduced me to Efe [Cakarel, CEO of MUBI], and it was like love at first sight. When I met Efe, he realized a strong cult fan base wanted this to be released. So we worked out something, and now here we are
Tarsem Singh: When we made it, there was a big problem: nobody wanted it for two years. People thought strategically that it was good for me to say some critics didn’t like it because it was in a long state, [so I] recut the film. I took out a minute and 40 seconds. One of those scenes should have stayed in the movie. I took out that scene and changed the title [card] up front, which was also a mistake.
The restoration wasn’t a problem because when we made the movie, I was so unlimitedly thinking this would actually live forever. At that particular time, only two movies had ever been finished in 4K. One was The Fall, and the second was this small film called, uhh, Iron Man. And then, somehow, this fool thought that his film was an equivalent, and I made it.
I thought it would be easy to find [the 4K files]. We could not find them. After a lot of searching for three or four years, we found an unfinished 4K without some of the special effects. We worked on that in Montreal and finally finished it. I put the scenes [I’d removed earlier] back in. I think the [now out-of-print] Blu-ray had the deleted scenes, but they were never finished properly. [For the restoration] I finished them properly and put them in.
Tarsem Singh: I hate saying Director’s Cut. Zack [Snyder’s] is a very good friend, and it works for him to re-release and have different cuts. I don’t have those. I got to make the film exactly how I wanted it. It’s just that when I got scared, and nobody would even take it for free, I could lie and say it’s a changed film when it was a minute and forty seconds less. All that stuff was something that always existed. We just cleaned it up and put it out.
Tarsem Singh: It could never get made, even when I made it. Everybody who had any muscle then, [like] David Fincher, tried to arrange all the meetings for me. And anywhere I would go, it was a film that could never be made. It shouldn’t have been made.
I was obsessed and had a particular reference in mind that I had to go and make this. There was a very tentative outline I gave to everyone to get [funding], and I would say a child is going to make it. I said I would tell the stories through her box about the things the child had stolen. And they said, “But where’s the script?” I said, “You don’t want to read it because it’s about 20 pages long, and the child will make the story.” And then, “Where are you shooting it?” I had 28 countries and said, “However many I can get into.” It’s all those kinds of answers that no financier could ever finance.
It just took an idiot with a broken heart. I had made all this money in advertising. I was going to live with this girl, and she dumped me. And I thought, I don’t know what this money is for. My head is gone because [the film] took a lot of preparation. I think it was 26 years of prepping it, 19 years of location scouting, and nine years of looking for the child. And then I found the child, and I just said, “Sell everything.”
Tarsem Singh: Yes, she’s coming here [to the premiere]! I’m bringing her here, she has a boyfriend and I said I’ll fly both of you. I meet her now and then in London. She’s not in London because she’s moved to another part of England up north. She works at Waterstones. She has a regular job, and her hobby is professional pole dancing. I meet her every couple of years. She’s coming here with her boyfriend, and I’ll meet her again today. I always call her my Russian tank; she’ll remind me and say, “No, your Romanian tank.” So my Romanian tank is coming here today.
Tarsem Singh: My biggest thing was to make it and make sure somebody can see it. I never cared about the reaction. It’s made for the people who like it. And the people who hate it, it’s okay. It’s not your film. The people think it’s okay, you fuck off. You can say it’s shit; I’m OK with that. And if it’s the best thing since sliced bread, I love you.
Listen to our podcast interview with Mapantsula director Oliver Schmitz about finishing this landmark South African film for the first time with the restoration.
Read our career profile of Patricia Rozema on the occasion of the 4K restorations of several of her films (including White Room and When Night is Falling).
Listen to our podcast discussion of the 4K restoration of Mike Leigh’s Naked.
Alex Heeney reviews Crocodile Tears, a genre-inflected first feature film about a toxic mother-son relationship, from Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon. The film is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024.
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
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An impressive debut film from Indonesian filmmaker Tumpal Tampubolon, Crocodile Tears is a horror-inflected story of a too-close relationship between a mother (Marissa Anita, who also appeared in Yuni) and her adult son, Johan (Yusuf Mahardika), who is trying to break free from her clutches. They own and work on a crocodile farm, which isolates them from the world and forces them to interact with deadly predators daily. Indonesia has the most crocodile attacks in the world, so although these are technically in captivity, the threat remains. When Johan meets and falls for a woman, it endangers the bond between mother and son.
In Crocodile Tears, Tampubolon shows an uncommon gift for blocking and mise en scène, sensitive to the space between characters and within the frame. Consider that Johan shares a bed with his mother, where she will embrace him like a lover at night while he carefully removes her arm. Or the first meeting between Johan’s mother and paramour, where Johan and his mother stand close to one another on one side of the frame, and his paramour is placed effectively between them, but also off to the side – not quite part of their world but about to throw a wrench in it. I feel like a bit too much of an ignorant North American to claim to understand the cultural context for Crocodile Tears fully, but that didn’t hamper my enjoyment; it only increased my curiosity.
Read our interview with filmmaker Kamila Andini about her film The Seen and The Unseen.
Andini also directed Yuni, a TIFF 2021 selection, which we also reviewed. Read the review of Yuni. Crocodile Tears star Marissa Anita also appears in Yuni.
Set in Indonesia but directed by an American (Joshua Oppenheimer, whose fiction feature The End is at TIFF this year), The Look of Silence is a documentary that follows an Indonesian man confronting perpetrators of genocide that led to his brother’s death.
Alex Heeney reviews the personal documentary film Tata by Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc. The film follows Lina as she reconnects with her estranged father and begins to ponder the origins of her intergenerational trauma and how to prevent passing it on to the daughter she’s expecting. Tata is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024
Read all of our TIFF 2024 coverage.
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Tata is a quietly powerful story of director Lina Vdovîi reconnecting with her abusive father. Estranged for over a decade, Vdovîi has made a career as a journalist helping the helpless. In the meantime, her father has become a victim of employer abuse. When he gets in touch out of the blue because he’s doing poorly, Lina, with husband and co-director Radu Ciorniciuc in tow, decides to pay her father a visit where he now lives in Italy. Although Lena grew up in Moldova, her father moved abroad when she was still a girl, meaning they’ve been estranged for years.
On arriving in Italy, Lina finds herself in the strange position of having the power to help her downtrodden father who was once her tormenter. Having spent her early years rendering her powerless, Lina’s father is now the victim of abuse from an employer who cruelly leverages Lina’s father’s status as a caretaker and immigrant.
As Lina and her father plot to get documentary evidence of his boss’s wrongdoings, Lina finds herself struggling with something more difficult. Is she more like her father than she’d like to think? How did feeling controlled as a child make her controlling as an adult? And how much is her father merely a bad person versus the product of a violent and abusive society? These soul-searching questions propel Lina to visit her mother, family, and childhood community in Moldova to learn about the culture that shaped her father into someone who believed beating his children was just good parenting.
Tata starts as an intimate story of a possible reconnection between father and daughter, but quickly becomes a story of cycles of abuse, the society that condones it, and how we prevent ourselves from passing on intergenerational trauma to our children. Lina is pregnant with her first child, so part of her journey in the film to reconnect with her father and his past is about trying to deal with her demons before her daughter arrives. In this way, it recalls the excellent Canadian short Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin at this year’s festival.
Lina’s journey is documented by her husband, Romanian co-director Radu Ciornicuc, whose Acasa, My Home was also a Seventh Row favourite. The cameraman is often seen on screen talking to Lina or in a mirror, emphasizing the intimate nature of the film. The film feels especially unstaged and raw because of the occasional microphone gaffe or messy camerawork.
Although this is Vdovîi’s story, we often see or hear Radu on camera, challenging Lina’s narrative about herself and her father in a way only a husband could: gently, lovingly, and perceptively. Personal documentaries about excavating family trauma have become a genre unto themselves lately, counting Still Processing, North by Current and this year’s A Family among them. But rarely does the filmmaker actually find themselves challenged by the person who knows them best — who also has a say in the making of the film. As Lina acknowledges and addresses the hard truths raised by Radu, the film transforms from a father-daughter story into an excavation of toxic cultural norms and intergenerational trauma.
In this episode of the TIFF 2024 podcast season, Alex discusses three films about bicultural daughters and their absent fathers: My Father’s Daughter, Winter in Sokcho, and A Missing Part.
View all of our TIFF 2024 coverage
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