Sexuality: society loves to package it, police it, profit off it, and then pretend it’s too taboo to talk about.
This year’s Philadelphia Film Festival lineup ripped the glossy veneer off that hypocrisy, exposing how desire is never just personal—it’s a battleground where power, control, and shame collide. Whether it’s commodified, punished, or weaponized, sexuality in these stories isn’t free—it’s taxed, policed, and always up for negotiation.
The Girl with the Needle: Mercy, Murder, and the Morality of Motherhood
Set against the cobblestone grimness of post-World War I Copenhagen, The Girl with the Needle (or, in the original Danish, Pigen med Nålen) paints a portrait of maternal mercy and social malice as twisted as Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) herself—the story’s self–styled savior. At first, it looks like a story of salvation: Karoline (Victoria Carmen Sonne), a young factory worker left jobless, pregnant, and deserted, is lured into the questionable safety net of Dagmar’s underground adoption agency. What begins as a tale of redemption for “wayward” women soon unravels into something much darker, as Dagmar’s act cracks open to reveal an industry of death disguised as mercy.
Dagmar is a character as chilling as she is convincing, embodying the very worst of weaponized compassion. She preys on Karoline and her clients, promising them escape from the cruel judgments society doles out to women who dare to veer off its narrow path of respectability. For the women she recruits, she’s an angel at the gates, the last chance for dignity. But to Dagmar, these women—and, crucially, their babies—are assets in a bleak economy of control. As Karoline is pulled deeper into Dagmar’s operation, she discovers a shocking truth: Dagmar’s form of mercy is terminal.
Dagmar’s mercy killings—a necessary evil and kindness in her eyes—are her twisted form of benevolence, and in her mind, a necessary evil. She believes she’s offering these unwanted children the best future possible by ensuring they never endure the struggles of their desperate mothers. This isn’t cruelty, she insists—it’s charity. By Dagmar’s reckoning, she is the only one honest enough to see that these children would be sentenced to lives of poverty, scorn, and suffering.
The Girl with the Needle begins as a psychological thriller, but transforms into a scathing social critique. Dagmar’s sinister business model isn’t an aberration—it’s a grotesque byproduct of a society that abandons women the moment they fail to conform. Her operation thrives because society makes it easy for her, shaming unwed mothers while pretending their children have “better futures” waiting somewhere else. By the end, Dagmar doesn’t just defend her actions; she dismantles the comfortable lie of adoption as salvation. To her, society’s dream of happy endings for these children is a bedtime story for the privileged—a way to avoid acknowledging the abandonment and poverty they leave others to endure.
In this world, motherhood is stripped of its sentimental glow. Society exalts the image of the “sacrificing mother” but condemns the real woman left alone, desperate, and judged. Dagmar doesn’t invent this cruelty—she exploits it, offering a chillingly logical solution to an impossible dilemma. Her actions are monstrous, but they’re also a reflection of the systemic callousness that creates women like her in the first place.
Dagmar’s courtroom monologue shifts the story’s focus from her crimes to society’s complicity. In a world that punishes women for their sexuality while denying them support, “mercy” and murder start to look uncomfortably alike. The film forces us to confront the hollowness of societal “compassion,” which is too often a mask for apathy toward the powerless.
Dagmar is more than a villain—she’s a mirror. Her operation is a twisted echo of a society that fetishizes motherhood while punishing women for it, that idolizes female sexuality only to shame and police it. The Girl with the Needle pulls no punches in showing us a world where compassion is cruelty in disguise, mercy is transactional, and forced motherhood is a cage. Dagmar’s logic is chilling not because it’s alien, but because it’s so disturbingly close to the truths society prefers to ignore.
Baby: Love, Machismo, and the Precarious Price of Queer Survival
Baby drops us into the raw, chaotic streets of São Paulo, where life is as unforgiving as the concrete jungle it takes place in. This is no pastel–filtered postcard of Brazil, but a gritty depiction of its underbelly where survival is a day–to–day negotiation. Wellington (João Pedro Mariano), freshly released from juvenile detention, finds a tenuous lifeline in Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), an older man whose promises of stability quickly blur into control. What begins as protection twists into exploitation as Ronaldo entangles Wellington in a relationship of dependency and coercion, steering him into the unforgiving underworld of sex work, where affection and dominance become inseparably—and dangerously—linked.
In a society dominated by machismo, Wellington’s sexuality is more than just a part of his identity; it’s a liability, a constant risk that leaves him vulnerable in every encounter. Brazil, with its hyper–masculine culture, doesn’t exactly hand out safe spaces to queer young men. Here, masculinity is a tightrope act, and Wellington is forced to walk it with Ronaldo’s hand on his shoulder, offering balance but also threatening to push him off at any moment. Baby uses this fraught relationship to explore what happens when survival and sexuality become painfully intertwined. Ronaldo is both mentor and manipulator, protector and predator, a figure who seems to embody the only kind of love Wellington is allowed to have. Their intimacy operates like a fragile transaction, born out of desperation rather than mutual trust—a hazardous exchange where moments of care are tightly bound to an undercurrent of control. Ronaldo doesn’t just offer Wellington shelter; he offers a version of himself that Wellington learns to accept, if only to keep the world’s sharper edges at bay. In a world that criminalizes vulnerability, Wellington learns to hide his softness, to wear his own identity like armor, even as he risks shedding pieces of himself along the way.
The film exposes the fraught realities of being queer in a world that thrives on erasure, where survival often hinges on compromises that strip away autonomy. For Wellington, survival is a constant negotiation, with his very sense of self reduced to a bargaining chip. Ronaldo represents the cruel paradox of queer existence in a hostile environment: his offer of stability comes with invisible chains, binding affection to dependence and safety to submission. Baby examines intimacy as a double–edged survival tool—capable of providing connection and comfort but just as likely to wound, leaving scars where trust should be.
The brilliance of Baby is its unwillingness to let us settle into easy judgments. Ronaldo is neither hero nor villain but a man caught in the same oppressive web that ensnares Wellington, his choices warped by the weight of societal expectations. In it, Ronaldo becomes a stand–in for a larger societal truth: queer existence is often met with conditional acceptance—love offered only when desire is quiet, when intimacy stays behind locked doors. His dominance reflects a world where power and protection are inseparable, where the vulnerable are forced to trade autonomy for survival. Baby doesn’t just show us these dynamics—it leaves us questioning how often love is burdened with unspoken rules and how many relationships are less about connection than survival in disguise.
In Baby, love and survival are two sides of the same coin, and Wellington’s life is defined by the tenuous balance between them. It’s a story about the lengths people go to feel seen, even if it means accepting love that comes with conditions. Baby challenges us to consider the cost of connection in a world that makes love feel like a dangerous luxury. And as Wellington and Ronaldo move through their dance of desire and dependency, we’re left to wonder: Is it better to cling to imperfect love than to have none at all?
The Last Showgirl: The Glitter, the Gaze, and the Trap of Female Empowerment
In The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson steps back into the spotlight with a performance that feels like both an invitation and an interrogation. Her performance is both a celebration and an autopsy of the showgirl myth, peeling back the glitter to reveal the blood, sweat, and existential doubt beneath. This isn’t just a story about sequins and stage lights; it’s a story about what happens when beauty, once a person’s greatest weapon, turns into their greatest burden. Anderson plays a woman who has spent decades mastering the art of allure, only to discover that the power it gave her was never really hers. If you’re not already subscribed to Pamela Anderson’s Substack, consider this your cue.
The film turns the showgirl into a metaphor for the impossible balancing act of femininity itself: dazzling, seductive, yet always under someone else’s control. Anderson’s character isn’t just performing for an audience; she’s performing her own identity, turning her body into a commodity and her life into a transaction. And while she may have wielded beauty as power, the film makes it painfully clear that the industry she worked for saw her as disposable the moment her desirability slipped even slightly out of frame.
Here’s where The Last Showgirl hits its sharpest note: casting Pamela Anderson woman who spent her real life under the crushing weight of the male gaze—makes this story cut closer to the bone. Anderson’s own history, from pin–up icon to a media punchline, parallels the showgirl’s plight. Her casting transforms the film into something more than fiction; it becomes a meta–commentary on what happens when a woman’s identity is so public, so curated, that it feels impossible to reclaim. She doesn’t just play the role—she embodies the fallout.
The male gaze isn’t a character in The Last Showgirl—it’s the invisible force shaping the story. Anderson’s character has absorbed it so fully that her self–worth has been rewritten in its image. The spotlight isn’t a source of validation anymore; it’s a trap she can’t escape. The film asks the question no one in her world wants to hear: Can a woman who has spent her life performing ever stop? Or does the act continue, long after the applause fades, long after the audience looks away?
Small Things Like These: Shame, Silence, and the Sins of a Saintly Society
Set in the deceptively peaceful Irish town of New Ross in 1985, Small Things like These follows Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a coal merchant whose life is so ordinary it’s practically wearing a cardigan. Bill’s days are a routine of deliveries, modest dreams, and quiet decency—that is, until he finds a skeleton in the closet of an entire community, a deeply buried reminder that in this town, faith and cruelty wear the same mask.
The convent at the heart of this story is a Magdalene Laundry, a grim institution run by the Catholic Church, where women with children born out of wedlock are locked away, their supposed sins scrubbed clean by forced labor and isolation. The Church, of course, calls it charity. But as Bill uncovers the truth, he realizes that this “charity” is less about saving souls and more about containing the perceived contagion of female sexuality.
Bill’s discovery of the laundry throws him into a moral crisis. Here is a man whose sense of right and wrong has always been guided by the Church. But faced with the horror of the laundries, Bill’s faith collides with a dark truth: the very institution he’s trusted to provide moral clarity has been wielding shame as a weapon, twisting virtue into something cold and merciless.
The brilliance of Small Things Like These lies in its slow, creeping exposure of the rot beneath the community’s religious façade. The film doesn’t just confront the Church’s cruelty; it interrogates the community’s silent complicity. New Ross is a town built on whispered secrets and polite denial, a place where everyone has agreed to look the other way as long as their own hands remain clean. It’s a pact of silence, a collective moral blindness that allows the Church’s atrocities to continue unchecked. Bill’s internal struggle isn’t just with the Church; it’s with the quiet cruelty of his neighbors, with the understanding that his own inaction is part of the problem.
The Church’s control over sexuality in Small Things Like These is as pervasive as it is brutal. For an institution that preaches forgiveness, it offers none to the women it condemns. Here, sexuality is not an expression of life but a sin to be expunged, a stain to be scrubbed out with relentless fervor. The laundries aren’t about redemption; they’re about erasure. The women inside are transformed from individuals into symbols, scapegoats bearing the weight of the community’s collective shame. By branding these women as irreparably “fallen,” the Church absolves itself of any duty of care, reducing their suffering to a twisted form of penance that serves only to preserve the institution’s own power.
Small Things Like These is a story of moral awakening, a quiet rebellion against a society that has traded its soul for the illusion of purity. It’s a haunting reminder that goodness isn’t measured by the prayers we say but by the actions we take—and sometimes, the only way to be good is to break the silence that holds the world in place.
Beyond the Bedroom: Politics of Sex and Power
These films leave us with a sobering takeaway: in a world obsessed with policing sexuality, true freedom is a rarity. For all our talk of liberation and agency, these films show how society has a vested interest in keeping desire on a leash. And it’s not just about “protecting” anyone—it’s about maintaining power, whether through shame, control, or outright erasure.
Together, The Girl with the Needle, Baby, The Last Showgirl, and Small Things Like These don’t give us easy answers or happy endings. Instead, they give us a mirror, asking us to confront the cost of living in a world where sexuality is a commodity, a threat, or a scandal. Real empowerment, they suggest, isn’t about playing the game on society’s terms. It’s about smashing those terms altogether. And these films remind us that when it comes to sexuality, society might claim to “know best,” but maybe it’s time to trust ourselves a little more.
For all our talk about progress, we’re still watching the same playbook of control, shame, and power games unfold across society. In an era where the personal should be political, there’s still a social obsession with keeping sexuality in check, especially when it threatens the status quo. Politicians preach “family values” while policing reproductive rights. Corporations sell empowerment, but only as long as it fits their brand image. And religious institutions have spent centuries treating women’s bodies like territories to conquer rather than choices to respect.
We say we’ve moved past Victorian repression, but we’ve just traded corsets for coded laws, traded shame for policing under the guise of “public morality.” This selection of films at the Philadelphia Film Festival reveals the truth: the world still loves to preach empowerment, but only as long as it fits neatly into a box labeled “appropriate.” And the minute someone steps out of that box—embracing their desires, refusing to be ashamed, or simply not hiding—society is ready to pounce.
