The 97th Academy Awards | 2025
Can ‘The Girl with the Needle’ win an Oscar?

By Lasse Sørensen, Courthouse News Service
February 28, 2025

Denmark is in the running this year for best international film at the Oscars. But the acclaimed film — which highlights a real-life child killer and delves into abortion — might be too political for the Academy.

Director Magnus von Horn’s “The Girl with the Needle” has been nominated for best international film at the 2025 Oscars, continuing an impressive Danish nomination streak. (Lukasz Bak/The Danish Film Institute via Courthouse News)

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (CN) — For seven years between 1913 and 1920, at least nine foster infants were killed in the Danish capital of Copenhagen.



Dagmar Overbye aka “The Angel Maker” admitted to killing 16 infants, including her own youngest — though authorities only found proof of nine.

The court recognized a pattern to the killings. Through newspaper ads, Overbye connected with desperate unmarried mothers and adopted their unwanted babies.

Taking a one-time fostering fee from the mothers, Overbye strangled or drowned the babies that same day, then buried, burned or hid the bodies. Her motives never came to light — and deeper questions about the gruesome case sparked debate in Denmark. Was Overbye solely to blame, or did society share some responsibility for publicly shaming parents who bore children out of wedlock?

Enter “The Girl with the Needle,” a 2024 film from Danish director Magnus von Horn that explores this gruesome true crime and its meaning. The gritty horror film has garnered rave reviews and is now a contender for best international feature film at the 2025 Oscars this Sunday.

The film stars Danish actor Vic Carmen Sonne as Karoline Aagesen, a real-life 21-year-old woman trying to stay afloat at the end of World War I. Working as a server, she finds herself pregnant with no plans to marry the father. She connects with Overbye, who agrees to adopt the child.

Days later, Karoline pleads to get her daughter back — but the baby is gone forever.

“The movie is fantastic, and it has something distinctive,” said Helle Haastrup, a professor at the University of Copenhagen who studies celebrity culture and cinema. “But,” she stressed, “it is also political.”

That’s because “The Girl with the Needle” dives into a sensitive issue in the United States: the right to free abortion.

Despite the film’s highly praised aesthetics, “my guess is that ‘The Girl with the Needle’ will not win,” Haastrup said, noting the political themes. Still, she said, “we never know.”

“The Girl with the Needle” is hardly the first Danish film to make a splash across the Atlantic. With four awards and 15 nominations throughout the history of the Best International Feature Film category, Denmark’s 6 million nationals have long punched above their weight.

Danish actors like Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Dar Salim and Ulrich Thomsen (to name just a few) have found their way to Hollywood. That’s on top of acclaimed Danish directors like Thomas Vinterberg, Nicolas Winding Refn and Susanne Bier, as well as animators and cinematographers from the small Nordic country who have gone on to strike it big.

“I think Denmark likes to see itself as a strong movie nation, and that is also justified,” Haastrup said. “Denmark has a film-school tradition that is seen as being world-class.”

For Malene Blenkov, head of fiction at the Danish Film Institute and a producer on “The Girl with the Needle,” stomach butterflies are flapping their wings as the Oscars approach this Sunday.

“I’m excited, and we are very happy about the nomination,” Blenkov said in an interview as she weighed the movie’s winning odds. “When you are nominated in such a narrow category, it proves that the movie is among the world elite.”

Blenkov gave credit to the many people involved in the film. “It’s a massive machinery,” she said.

She was also thrilled to see Denmark once again in the running. “It’s absolutely insane. Do you even realize that we, for the past 18 years, are one of the few nations that have been the most nominated?” Blenkov said. “Teeny-tiny Denmark.”

Plenty of Danes will no doubt stay up to watch the Oscars when it airs in the country at 1:00 a.m. on Monday.

“The Oscars are always more interesting to watch when there’s a Danish movie,” Haastrup said.

Few are holding their breath for an Oscars win just yet. Stacking the odds that “The Girl with the Needle” might actually take home the prize, Mathias Reimer Larsen, an analyst at the Danish bookie Danske Spil, put them at just 2.5%.

“Not much suggests that the Danish film industry will add another Oscar statuette to the collection, even though the movie has received solid backing from Danish audiences,” Larsen wrote in an email to Courthouse News. But national pride is real: Despite those abysmal odds, more than 80% are betting the home favorite will win best international. “Our customers are crossing their fingers.”

But there are reasons “The Girl with the Needle” might not be a favorite with U.S. judges. A black-and-white art film, it has a strong, distinct style that might not resonate in Hollywood the way it does in Cannes.

Another reason: its overt political context. “People see it as controversial because we don’t like to witness it,” said Blenkov, the producer. “But this is how it was, and it contributes to show what happened in the past and perhaps see it in perspective of how things are today.”

If “The Girl with the Needle” delves into controversial themes, in other words, that's because it’s not exactly avoiding them. “There are still many countries not allowing abortion,” Blenkov added. “This movie contributes to asking, ‘What else can you do in such a situation?’”