In 1919, in a Copenhagen scarred by the first world war, a young woman’s already meagre supply of luck runs out. Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) loses her home, then her job as a seamstress. She is pregnant, destitute and desperate. A chance encounter with Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), who runs an illegal adoption service, offers a lifeline, employment and perhaps even hope for the future. But hope, like everything in this arresting, factually based black-and-white drama, is threadbare, undernourished and rotten to the core.

Director Magnus von Horn, whose previous film was the equally impressive Sweat, about an unravelling fitness influencer, frequently lights actors from beneath. A deliberately unflattering approach borrowed from horror cinema, it turns faces into grotesque gargoyles, strips them of softness and humanity and highlights the animalistic savagery. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sonne’s phenomenal, feral performance. Karoline is a pitiable victim certainly, but she is also a sly and opportunistic emotional scavenger with a capacity for cruelty. It’s a remarkable film: bleak, but horribly compelling.

• In UK and Irish cinemas