Mark Reviews Movies: THE GUILTY (2018)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 18, 2018

Even though the entirety of The Guilty is set in two rooms within a single location, the film is an intense thriller and a twisty mystery. We're never privy to the action of what's happening within the plot, a story involving an abducted woman and the hunt for the man who took her. Instead, the whole film is experienced from the perspective of the emergency service operator who takes her initial phone call.

Not once does co-writer/director Gustav Möller leave the man's side, except at the very end of the film, when he and we are finally given a little room to breathe. It's not too far away from what has happened over the course of this night, but it is far enough.

A less certain filmmaker surely would give us some visual idea of what's happening on the other end of the phones that call Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) over the course of the night. Such a movie would cut back and forth between our protagonist and the kidnapped woman, the woman's daughter, the police officer who helps Asger investigate the abduction, the dispatch operators who send the cops looking for the woman, and the police themselves. Maybe we'd even get an idea of what's happening but only through Asger's imagination. One almost dreads the possibility of a Hollywood remake of this Danish film while watching it—how some executive would insist that an audience needs to see what's happening in order to understand or be invested in the story.

That lack of direct knowledge is exactly the source of the film's tension. We don't see what's happening or see what Asger imagines is happening. The imagining is left entirely to us. We can hear the woman's hushed tones, while pretending that she's calling her daughter. We can hear her stifled cries, as a deeper voice whispers something or other to her. We hear the squeaking of the windshield wipers in the vehicle where some man has her held hostage, as well as the spattering of rain on the windows and the rush of traffic. There's a moment here when we learn that the man who abducted her is driving in a van, and the rush of finally having a better picture in our mind is undeniable.

We're along for this intense ride with Asger, solely from his point of view. We're figuring out the details. We're trying to understand the motive. We're trying to determine some way that this woman can be helped or can help herself out of the situation.

We also get a pretty good picture of the kind of man Asger is, too. He's a cop who's at the emergency services call center for some reason that involves a court hearing the next day. In a way, then, Möller and co-screenwriter Emil Nygaard Albertsen have given us a two-tiered mystery with this story. There's the mystery of the abducted woman, as well as everything that goes along with the story of her and her apparently abusive husband and the two children she has left behind, and there's also the mystery of what Asger did and what will become of him as a result.

The woman is named Iben (voice of Jessica Dinnage), and her first call to emergency services, in which she refers to Asger as "sweetie," raises an alarm in Asger's head. He gets some information out of her using only yes-or-no questions. She has been abducted, and with a few searches through the police database, Asger figures out that her captor is her husband Michael (voice of Johan Olsen). He calls Iben's 6-year-old daughter (voice of Katinka Evers-Jahnsen), who's alone with her baby brother at the family's home. From there, he obtains more information and promises the girl that she'll see her mother again.

The guy is good at this job, even if it isn't technically his job. We admire him at first—for his ingenuity, his attentiveness, and his obvious level of caring about Iben's fate. As the night progresses, though, we also begin to see that his willingness to help has another side—the potential for recklessness, the way that he ignores everything else around him, the way that his eagerness to help becomes obsessive.

Cedergren's performance here is vital to the film's success. The camera is always on him, sometimes at a distance and often in extreme close-up. It's an effortless portrayal of a seemingly good and dutiful man, who has some significant issues with control and begins to fall apart as he realizes he has no control over this situation—not to mention the one that put him here in the first place. There are hints from his partner on the force Rashid (voice of Omar Shargawi), whom Asger recruits to search Michael's home for clue—breaking in to the house if necessary. There's also a hint in that willingness to bypass the law if Asger—and Asger alone—deems it must be done.

To reveal any more would be unfair, because the entire story is really about how perspective and impressions can be wrong. We think we know what's happening between Iben and Michael, because we're taking cues from Asger, who has a certain way of looking at the world and how people behave. If his intuition is wrong, does that mean we can't trust anything about him—his past, his ability to make such decisions, his real motive for being so fixated by a desire to do good? The Guilty does give us the answers, and they're neither simple nor pretty.

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