The Guilty: Hollywood Remake of Danish Thriller Recreates the Original’s Edgy Vibe
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B+
Jake Gyllenhaal is electrifying as an LAPD cop demoted, rather ironically, to 911 duty in director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the fabulous 2018 Danish thriller, Den skyldige.
Then again, Gyllenhaal must be electrifying considering pretty much the whole movie rests on close-ups of his face in a headset screaming at disembodied voices on the phone. But oh, those voices.
When an apparently abducted woman (Riley Keough) calls 911, Gyllenhaal’s Joe is quickly sucked into a confusing but fast-moving vortex of crime. Desperate to establish where Keough’s Emily and her abductor are heading in their vehicle, Joe tries everything to locate them, pulling other emergency workers, fellow cops, and highway patrol into the spiralling situation.
In doing so, we witness Joe’s hair-trigger volatility, and we know from sidebar scenes that he is facing a major criminal investigation which resulted in his punitive 911 assignment. All is revealed at the film’s climax. Joe is a man on edge, managing a life-or-death situation on the eve of his trial. Things could not be more tense.
But things are not as they appear. Joe also comes to understand that abducted Emily has left a toddler and an infant unsupervised at home. And her abductor, Joe soon learns, is the father, a possibly unstable and murderous villain. Add to the mix the fact that the wildly under-pressure Joe is in no condition to stage-manage a complex unfolding family drama. Or is he?
Where the original was dimly lit and stark, director Fuqua — reunited with his Southpaw star Gyllenhaal — has encroaching California wildfires as a backdrop here, reinforcing the film’s overarching sense of urgency and claustrophobia.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Like the film’s central character, who is frantically working that phone, the viewer must draw pictures in her head to makes sense of the conversation and ambient background noises (car sounds, cries) she hears. People being people, we imagine the worst. In the case of The Guilty, the worst we can imagine is exactly what we get though it arrives with a twist.
If you feel you’ve seen something like this before, you might have, via the tense drama Locke from 2013 (recommended). In that film, a businessman (played by Tom Hardy) hurtles down a motorway while speaking non-stop to family and business associates on his mobile, each call giving us another tidbit of plot.
We never see the character of Locke outside his car, or any of the people he is speaking with. As with The Guilty, the confined space maximizes the critical mood, mooring us right there amid the action and requiring much more investment than with conventional thrillers.
Rarely do remakes capture the lightning in the bottle of the source material. But The Guilty does, no doubt in part because screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto, best known for the True Detective series, drafted Gustav Möller, who wrote the original screenplay for and directed the original. Whether a remake was needed remains debatable, but the vision remains intact.
The Guilty. Directed by Antoine Fuqua. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal. In theatres September 24, on Netflix October 1.