Cannes film festival
Loosely based on fact, Magnus van Horn’s fictionalised true crime nightmare leaves you with a shiver of pure fear

Just in case you were thinking that this is an upbeat story of a sweet young seamstress winning BBC TV’s The Great British Sewing Bee, the needle in question is in fact a knitting needle for giving yourself an abortion in a public bath-house in post-first world war Copenhagen. This film from Poland-based Swedish director Magnus van Horn – making his Cannes competition debut – is a macabre and hypnotic horror, a fictionalised true crime nightmare based on Denmark’s baby-killer case from 1921, shot in high-contrast expressionist monochrome and kept at an almost unbearable pitch of anxiety by Frederikke Hoffmeier’s nerve-abrading musical score.

I was unconvinced by Van Horn’s previous film, the social media satire Sweat, but this new one is horribly effective grand guignol, made with enormous technical flair, like Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd without the bleak humour – there are touches of Lynch, Von Trier or even Tod Browning here. It is about a world in which women’s lives are disposable and in which the authorities are disapproving of and disgusted by their suffering – and set at a time in which the first world war had normalised the idea of mass murder. I actually found myself thinking of something further back to the Malthusian suicides in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: “Done because we are too many.”