Review by Jacquelin Hipes
The Guilty, director Gustav Möller’s first feature film, is many things. It’s a one-room crime thriller; it’s a look at the daily stresses of emergency dispatchers; most of all, it’s a spotlight for the considerable talent of lead actor Jakob Cedergren, who must single-handedly carry off a film that relies on telephone conversations to advance life-or-death stakes.
Cedergren stars as Asger Holm, a Copenhagen police officer who has been assigned to dispatch duty for what we’re lead to believe are disciplinary reasons. He adopts a stern attitude toward most callers, particularly those in the middle of drunken bar fights or victims of muggings in the red light district they were patronizing. This blasé outlook evaporates when he takes a breathy, hushed call from a kidnapped woman (Jessica Dinnage) trapped in a van with her abductor, who thinks she’s on the phone with her daughter. Asger pries a few scant details from her using yes-or-no questions before the call disconnects; the nearest cell tower gives him enough information to share with patrol units in the area, setting off a broad search effort.
The formless threat of a kidnapping soon condenses into a disturbing domestic case. Tracking down and calling Iben’s home phone number, Asger learns that her two young children have been left alone after witnessing an altercation between her and her husband Michael (Johan Olsen), who dragged his wife away at knifepoint. Only the first of several revelations that realign the power balance and shift focus onto one suspect, then another, Asger sniffs out this and other clues from behind his desk as if he still walked the streets. Cedergren turns in a superb performance, cajoling, comforting, and furious in turns as he struggles against the narrow restrictions of a desk job. And Möller never cheats: not once do we leave the call center. That Cedergren can keep pulses racing through ninety minutes of well-paced action is testament alone to his prowess.
Excellent sound design does offer a tantalizing taste of the world beyond Asger’s station—a busy highway, the echoing interior of a van, a windy overpass—without shattering its stifling seclusion. The soundtrack creeps in sparingly; the bulk of the film’s tension comes exclusively from the efforts of Cedergren and the cast of voice actors on the other side of his headset. If the final revelation feels simply clever rather than earth-shattering, it doesn’t harm the overall effect. The Guilty is a lean thriller that contracts as it expands, trapping the viewer with a man of action stripped down to his voice and his humanity in the most nightmarish of situations. Worth seeing for Cedergren’s performance alone, it provides perfectly packaged thrills just in time for summer.
