Montreal Gazette

Exhilarati­ng thriller? Guilty as charged

- CHRIS KNIGHT cknight@postmedia.com

A title like the one on this Danish police thriller raises a question: Just who is the guilty party? Is it the cynical cop working Denmark’s equivalent of the 911 call centre? The man who just kidnapped a woman, leading to her frantic call? Maybe it’s writer-director Gustav Möller, for clever use of distractio­n and deception?

One definite innocent party is the audience. The country’s submission for the foreignlan­guage Oscar prize this year is nail-bitingly effective, and far too good to qualify as a mere guilty pleasure. It’s a straight-up pleasure, simple as that.

Jakob Cedergren stars as Asger, a burnt-out Copenhagen cop whose contemptuo­us view of human nature isn’t helped by the calls he takes.

When someone reports being mugged by a female assailant in the red-light district, he assumes the victim is a John and lets him stew a while before sending help. To an injured cyclist calling for an ambulance: “Take a taxi, and don’t bike when you’re drunk.”

Then there’s Iben (Jessica Dinnage). She seems reluctant to talk, and Asger quickly figures out it’s because she can’t. She’s in a car with her abductor, who thinks she’s on the phone to her daughter.

Asger works by the book, learning what he can through yes-or-no questions, alerting police to the situation, then sending cops to the woman’s home to comfort her daughter, who’s only six.

That would seem to be it for Asger — his shift is about to end, and ambiguous comments suggest he has other worries, something about being in court the next day.

But he can’t seem to let this case go. He starts playing detective,

sending a colleague to investigat­e a lead. “I assigned this to myself,” he says by way of explanatio­n.

Möller keeps us always in the same room as Asger, although for the purposes of cinematogr­aphy and drama he at one point switches offices and then draws the blinds, just as the plot darkens.

But we never see any of the characters he is speaking to, and must rely on aural clues for informatio­n. Will you believe your ears? Or would that make you guilty of jumping to conclusion­s? The Guilty will keep you guessing.

 ?? MONGREL MEDIA ?? Jakob Cedergren stars as a cynical police officer working at a 911 call centre in the new Danish thriller The Guilty.
MONGREL MEDIA Jakob Cedergren stars as a cynical police officer working at a 911 call centre in the new Danish thriller The Guilty.

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