Ethical Displacement and the Cinematic Afterlife of Maternal Violence in The Girl with the Needle

This study theorises, rearticulates, and secures The Girl with the Needle (2024) as a rigorously constructed cinematic formation staging the Dagmar Overbye case within the interlocking logics of ethical displacement and the cinematic afterlife of maternal violence. Departing from interpretive paradigms anchored in psychological deviance or narrative causality, the film reconfigures, disciplines, and reorders motherhood as a structurally regulated practice shaped by silence, repetition, spatial enclosure, and institutional abandonment. Violence registers, circulates, and persists as an affective and durational condition sustained within an austere formal economy organised around architectural confinement, narrative delay, procedural repetition, and acoustic restraint. Spectatorship undergoes displacement, assumes proximity, and endures exposure, relinquishing interpretive mastery in favour of ethical adjacency. Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical constellation encompassing feminist psychoanalysis, care ethics, trauma aesthetics, and postmemory theory, the analysis demonstrates, substantiates, and elaborates on maternal care as compromised labour, depleted of affective reciprocity, and maintained by routinised continuity. Trauma operates, accumulates, and inscribes itself as a persistent structure of collective memory, acquiring cinematic legibility via residue, suspension, and formal withholding. By foregrounding ethical displacement as a central cinematic operation, this study advances, extends, and repositions feminist film theory and trauma studies, articulating cinema’s capacity to sustain the afterlife of maternal violence beyond narration, explanation, or redemptive closure.