“The Guilty”
In theory, Gustav Möller’s Danish thriller “The Guilty” does the extraordinary by successfully breaking the traditional rules of cinema. It’s a film that takes place almost completely in an emergency call center where a police officer (Jakob Cedergren) attempts to help a woman (Jessica Dinnage) who sounds as though she’s been kidnapped. The camera never cuts away from the officer, yet through an impressive script, on-point performances and stellar sound design, the final product has audiences on edge. So much so that the film took the World Cinema Audience Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
Möller came up with the idea after stumbling on a real 911 call from the United States on YouTube. It was 20 minutes long and also featured a kidnapped woman sitting next to her abductor. After researching Danish call centers (quite different from those in America, it turns out), his biggest concern was that if he combined Cedergren’s filmed performance with edited audio of the other actors the viewer might think they were listening to a radio drama. He notes, “When actors are standing in front of a mike reading a line they can get focused only on their voice. I wanted them to actually play out the scene, just without a camera.”
To make that work, Möller and his production team set up stations on the same floor as the main set where each of the voice actors would play out their scenes in “real time” to make it sound as natural as possible. He adds, “We built a little mock car with chairs. And when they walk around in a house we would tape up the floor plan of the house they’re walking around in.”