The Guilty (2021) - Movie Review

 

 

Okay, I want to give Antoine Fuqua another chance, after how baffling his last production turned out. And as easy as it is to completely write this off as unnecessary because it’s an American remake of a European film (and of a film that I have reviewed previously), I can actually see the merit in remaking this specific feature.

The whole point of the original film was its sound design, with the plot revolving around the lead character being on the phone for the entire run time, so having all that sound be in a language I speak naturally means I can focus more on hearing that sound design rather than divvying up time between that and reading it (yeah, yeah, “lazy Westerners hate subtitles”, so cry the people being a lot more ableist than they realise; save the elitism for another time, 'kay?). There’s also how (and this is admittedly information I didn’t know about when I reviewed the original) the whole idea for this story came from director/co-writer Gustav Möller watching a YouTube video recording of a 911 call. So it’s basically being re-translated back into where it first came from; this could legitimately have a chance at working.

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.