The Guilty (2019) - Movie Review

This is one of those ideas that, on paper, feels like the worst possible fit for a visual medium. It’s the story of a Copenhagen policeman who is on desk duty and manning the phone line. For the entirety of the film’s run time, we never leave his side; the majority of the other characters and pretty much all of the narrative is given to us through dialogue, with only background noises during the phone calls giving us a ‘picture’ of what’s going on. This isn’t the first time this has been attempted, but when your contemporaries include The Call with Halle Berry, the capacity for mediocrity is quite high. And yet, even with the lack of visual detail, this works really damn well. Namely, because it highlights what else goes into the cinematic process besides the visuals.

It’s a fairly basic production, one that goes further into simplicity than even scriptsploitation could manage, and one where the limited aspects on display needed to be on-point across the board. Thankfully, that’s exactly what we get here. While there are a few supporting actors at the police station where the film takes place in (we never physically leave it, adding further to the potential problems with visual monotony), it’s largely carried by Jakob Cedergren in the lead. And hot damn, does he do a fine job here. Between the admirable smoothness of his character arc throughout the film and his pretty intense performance, Cedergren acts as the conflicted core of what quickly turns into a very conflicted story.

From there, the sound design is astoundingly good, to the point where the presence of background noise becomes a vital component of the storytelling here. As we listen in on the emergency calls, we are essentially put into the same position as Cedergren’s Asger: We need to put the pieces together to figure out the mystery. What begins as a routine kidnapping turns into something a lot less cut-and-dry, involving some pretty horrific scenarios that, even though we don’t actually see them, still manage to give palpable spine chills just through the performances. It’s the kind of approach that makes this made-for-radio story feel like it still fits into a visual medium: Because the audience, much like Asger, can’t see the whole picture.

It’s because of that that the story, for as twisty as it gets (and for as mildly predictable as it gets at times), keeps a nimble pace throughout. While Asger reaches points of desperation to try and save the kidnapped woman who initially called him, it reveals more about who he is and why he is so invested in this one call in a very Drive kind of way. Not that this is completely devoid of exposition, but the explicit details we do get are revealed gradually so that the whole picture sneaks up on everyone on both sides of the screen. It makes what’s happening on the other side of the phone line feel that much more urgent and gripping, and it makes what we can actually see on this side of it feel that much more tragic and kind of heartbreaking.

It’s a high-concept character piece that gets a lot done in a minimal amount of time and physical space, and the fact that it seems to be bucking against its own medium at every turn makes its successes that much more intriguing.