Magnus Von Horn
The director of The Girl With the Needle bounces back into Competition
In 2020, Magnus von Horn was excited to nd that his lm Sweat had been accepted into the O cial Selection at Cannes, a big step up from his debut, The Here After, which made Directors’ Fortnight in 2015. The pandemic put an end to that, but his disappointment was short-lived; this year, his dark atmospheric follow-up, The Girl With the Needle, sees him joining the big league. “This is huge to me,” he beams. “The main competition!”
Set in Denmark during World War I, the lm stars Vic Carmen Sonne as Karoline, a young seamstress whose soldier husband is missing in action. Through a series of mishaps, Karolin falls pregnant, loses her job, and meets a mysterious woman named Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) who runs both a candy store and an adoption agency. “I’ve been developing this lm for many years,” says Von Horn, “and the starting point was a true story, of one of the most horrendous and controversial crimes in Danish history. I don’t want to spoil things by explaining exactly what that was, but it was a story that provoked me very deeply. At rst, I couldn’t see a way to tell that story, in a way that wasn’t just exploiting the matter, or in a way that would be meaningful. That’s very much when the idea of the main character came in, and her journey through poverty, looking for a better life in post-world War I Copenhagen. I began to think, How much do we want a better life? And what price are we prepared to pay for that?”
Now based in Poland, where he graduated from Łódź Film School in 2013, Von Horn has always pursued a career in lm. “I’ve made lms since as long as I can remember. I tried many di erent things in art—painting, poetry, and music—but lmmaking somehow clicked with me. I don’t know exactly why, but I do know that when I look back on the lms I did as a teenager, they’re more or less exactly the same as the lms I’m making now, thematically. There are certain kinds of stories that attract me, often with a darkness that I think I can express in lmmaking.”