In
the glory days of radio, Sorry, Wrong
Number kept listeners on the edge of their seats, simply by inviting them
to listen in on an increasingly tense series of telephone calls. That is the basic
premise behind this lean Danish thriller. It turns out smart writing and a
ferocious nearly-single-handed lead performance make the formula crackle and
pop, just like it did in the old school wireless era, in Gustav Möller’s The Guilty, which screens during the
2018 Sundance Film Festival.
It
might be a good idea for first responders to have a better idea of each other’s
jobs, but Asger Holm is convinced he was assigned to the Danish equivalent of a
9-1-1 call center as a punishment, because it very definitely was. However, if
he and his partner Rashid can keep their stories straight at tomorrow’s
disciplinary hearing, he should be returning to regular cop duties. Everything
changes when Iben calls.
Holm
quickly deduces the woman is pretending to talk to her young daughter Mathilde rather than emergency services,
because she was abducted by her resentful ex-husband Michael. He manages to glean
details, such as the color and make of Michael’s white van, but the general
location—somewhere along the North Zealand expressway—is not enough for the
uniform cops to track them down. However, a call from the terrified Mathilde
will motivate Holm to work the phones and internet, even pressing Rashid into unofficial
duty, in hopes of anticipating Michael’s next moves.
Although
they were different genres, The Guilty bears
strong comparison with Locke, Steven
Knight’s terrific man-on-car-phone dark-night-of-the-soul. That very definitely
means Jacob Cedergren can hang with Tom Hardy and the screenwriting of Möller
and Emil Nygaard Albertsen is on par with that of Knight. This is high praise
indeed, but it is warranted.
Cedergren
is not unknown to discerning American viewers thanks to Terribly Happy and Those Who
Kill, but his tour-de-force work in The
Guilty should take him to a new level. It is a slow-burning turn that
eventually but completely believably explodes, like a crackpot disaster.
Actually, the cast on the phone are not as strong as Andrew Scott and Olivia
Colman in Locke, but Cedergren
carries them along, nonetheless.
The Guilty is particularly
effective, because it leads us to share each of Holm’s inaccurate or incomplete
assumptions. As a result, when night close in on him, we feel like we are right
there too. Altogether, it is quite a lethally effective procedural thriller. Very
highly recommended, The Guilty screens
tomorrow (1/21), Monday (1/22), Thursday (1/25), and next Saturday (1/27) in Park
City and Tuesday (1/23) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance.