The Guilty (2018)
Directed by Gustav Möller
Police officer Asger Holm, demoted to desk work as an alarm dispatcher, answers a call from a panicked woman who claims to have been kidnapped. Confined to the police station and with the phone as his only tool, Asger races against time to get help and find her.
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It’s reminiscent of Tom Hardy’s performance in Locke , another character who’s trying to solve problems via phone call, and it’s just as commanding.
Taking place entirely inside the Emergency Services call center and with only minimal input from the supporting cast, this is as focused and as meticulously plotted a real-time thriller as any I’ve ever seen, at least since Steven Knight’s 2013 Tom Hardy gem Locke .
I was reminded of Tom Hardy’s bravura solo performance in “Locke,” which was set almost entirely in a speeding car.
The sparse and stripped down Danish thriller The Guilty will likely earn favourable comparisons to similarly minded efforts like Locke and The Call, but this single room drama about a disgraced police officer’s last chance for moral redemption will leave viewers riveted from start to finish with ease.
The dissonance of personhood and the ways in which people attempt to reach one another make for Locke on lockdown and Hamlet in a holding room.
La acción de Locke se desarrollaba íntegramente dentro de un coche, durante un viaje de dos horas desde Birmingham a Londres, protagonizada exclusivamente por un hombre angustiado (qué actor tan admirable y camaleónico es Tom Hardy) que habla por teléfono con su esposa, sus hijos y sus jefes y sus empleados en una constructora y la olvidable amante de una noche que va a parir una criatura de ambos.
Möller’s camera never leaves the confines of the call center for the duration of the film, and Asger’s own spiritual descent as the night wears on is mirrored by his physical surroundings growing darker and more claustrophobic — until a final shot that reframes everything that came before it, or at least signifies that the influence of John Ford’s The Searchers knows no bounds.
(Hitchcock himself entertained the idea of making a thriller centered on a phone in the 1960s—an idea that evolved decades later into the 2003 film Phone Booth .)
We’ve seen a similar framework go horribly awry (Phone Booth, The Call), yet The Guilty breathes new life into this low-budget, high-concept subgenre.
To Möller’s credit, his first feature is more like “Locke” than “Phone Booth,” with the single location and the real-time approach feeling appropriate to the story he’s telling, rather than just a gimmick.
Yet in film the convention often falls into dramatic hyperbole (think of Phone Booth's godlike sniper), or become afraid of their own high concept, and bolt for open space (cf The Call).
But The Guilty , with the telephone as its core tool, has more in common with films such as Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth and, particularly, with Locke , in which during a two hour car drive and 36 calls Tom Hardy squeezed every last drop of panicked perspiration out of a real-time marriage breakdown coupled with unexpected forays into concrete engineering.
With only a ping off a cell tower near a highway to go off, Asger jumps into action—though, unlike Halle Berry’s character in the similarly premised The Call , he never leaves the call center.
Like Steven Knight's Locke (or Brad Anderson's American 911 precursor, The Call ), almost the entirety of The Guilty revolves around one individual, on the phone, trying to work through a problem - a scenario that doesn’t really lend itself to captivating cinema.
The sparse and stripped down Danish thriller The Guilty will likely earn favourable comparisons to similarly minded efforts like Locke and The Call, but this single room drama about a disgraced police officer’s last chance for moral redemption will leave viewers riveted from start to finish with ease.
We’ve seen a similar framework go horribly awry (Phone Booth, The Call), yet The Guilty breathes new life into this low-budget, high-concept subgenre.
If you loved Tom Hardy in “Locke” or Halle Berry in “The Call” you’re going to love “The Guilty.”
Unlike a film like Brad Anderson’s The Call starring Halle Berry, The Guilty doesn’t cut away to the actual action whatsoever, not even in brief cuts.
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In the vein of Locke and My Dinner with Andre , it isn’t exactly a one-man show fronted by Jakob Cedergren, but works as well as it does thanks to director Gustav Möller’s taut editing, voice cast, and sound effects that create a haunting scene halfway through the film without a drop of onscreen blood.
November 27, 2018 – The Danish film about a morally conflicted emergency services operator reminded me a lot of another Danish film about a morally conflicted army officer, “A War” (Krigen - 2015).
Buried from a couple years ago tackled a similar idea but that was a little more of a B-movie, while this one feels like it's trying to make a larger point.
Much like Tom Hardy in Locke or Ryan Reynolds in Buried, Jakob Cedergren isn’t afforded the luxury of a cast of other performers to share the spotlight with him.
While the plight of an emergency dispatcher calls to mind forgettable Halle Berry vehicle “The Call,” Moller’s movie actually bears more of a resemblance to “Locke” and “Buried,” single-set movies based almost entirely around a single character and the fragmented communications he has with the outside world.
Fans of single-setting thrillers like Buried and Locke should definitely check out this compelling Danish story set in an emergency call centre.
Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in Rope , 3D in Dial M For Murder , and studios sets in Lifeboat and Rear Window , one of his celebrated and most imitated films.
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Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in Rope , 3D in Dial M For Murder , and studios sets in Lifeboat and Rear Window , one of his celebrated and most imitated films.
Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in Rope , 3D in Dial M For Murder , and studios sets in Lifeboat and Rear Window , one of his celebrated and most imitated films.