The Guilty [Den skyldige] *** (2018, Jakob Cedergren, voice of Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi) – Movie Review 

Co-writer/ director Gustav Möller’s 2018 film The Guilty is a commendably tense and creepy, dark and claustrophobic Danish noir thriller. It is set in the single location of a police station’s emergency telephone call centre, and runs with mostly just a single character in a semblance of real time. But that is not going to give Gustav Möller or his screenplay co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen any problems.

Star actor Jakob Cedergren has the whole film more or less to himself and is absolutely excellent in a tour-de-force performance with the cameras stuck up his nose, his ears or his chin as police alarm dispatch officer Asger Holm, who races against time to try to save a kidnapped woman who makes an emergency call to him. She reveals that she is Iben (voice of Jessica Dinnage) and is being abducted at knifepoint by her estranged husband, who is driving her off to her doom somewhere.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Asger Holm has problems of his own and is due in court next day. Notwithstanding, he remains mostly very cool, calm and detached, while desperately wanting to save Iben, in a way of self recovery and redemption.

The rivetingly intense set-up is the best part of the film, and that runs for around an hour. The third act when all is revealed is not quite as good, but is still strong and surprising, with its twisty revelations carefully concealed and hard, if not impossible to guess.

Even though it recalls Tom Hardy in Locke and especially Hallie Berry in The Call, it is still fairly unique and definitely a worthwhile as an experimental success and exercise in Hitchcockian suspense. It runs a neat and tidy compact 85 minutes, and Möller makes every minute count.

The director, producer Lina Flint, cinematographer Jasper J Spanning and the film editor Carla Luffe Heintzelmann are all graduate friends from the National Film School of Denmark.

It is Denmark’s official submission to the Foreign Language Film Award of the 91st Oscars.

It is remade as the 2021 American film The Guilty, with Jake Gyllenhaal.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review 

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