This Danish cop dials up the tension
The Guilty (15) Verdict: Smart Scandi thriller ★★★★✩ Utøya — July 22 (15) Verdict: A disturbing re-enactment ★★✩✩✩
TAUT abduction thriller The Guilty pares drama to its bare bones and fires up the audience’s imagination in the process.
Set in a police emergency response department in Denmark, the story is mostly told through panicked phonecalls. The camera is right in the face of Jakob Cedergren, who plays Asger Holm, an officer who takes a call from a hysterical woman being kidnapped.
Like Locke — which starred Tom Hardy, a car and a mobile phone — The Guilty is smartly written, ramping up the tension with twist after twist, so your heart starts thumping in sympathy.
The sounds of a woman’s growing terror, a van on a rainy motorway, an angry ex-con and a crying child all raise the stakes. Jessica Dinnage voices Iben, the mother who has been kidnapped, leaving her six-yearold daughter and baby son home alone.
Her abductor allows her a call to the kids; instead she phones the police, saying cryptically: ‘ Hi sweetie.’ Asger then has to puzzle out where she is and who has taken her, without giving himself away.
There’s a growing sense of dread as the case unravels, along with Asger’s emotions. He seems to be an officer who sometimes gets too involved with his work. Layered between the calls and the investigation is Asger’s own troubled life: it appears he has broken up with his wife and is due in court the next day to testify in a police shooting case.
Although this film is in Danish with subtitles, after so many Scandi-noir TV series, the accent — and British-influenced swearing — go almost unnoticed.
The Guilty is Denmark’s foreign language Oscar entry, and an accomplished debut from director and co-writer Gustav Moller.
THE same restraint is not shown in another Scandinavian offering this week, UTøYA — JULY 22 a drama based on the real- life 2011 massacre of 77 teenagers and children by a Right-wing Norwegian gunman.
Why director Eric Poppe has made this re- enactment, with fictional characters, based on survivors’ accounts is anyone’s guess. But it’s an uncomfortable watch, without a clear moral compass. It does, however, showcase some bravura moviemaking, with the story of one girl, Kaja, filmed in what is claimed to be a 72-minute single take.
Kaja ( Andrea Berntzen) is trapped at a Labour Party camp on Utøya Island as Anders Breivik massacres child after child.
But from Kaja’s point of view, all is chaos, and much of the carnage is distant and mysterious, as she races for her life through the woods and searches for her missing sister.
British director Paul Greengrass has also made a similar feature, 22 July, for Netflix.
Is any of this useful or cathartic? Or just gruelling to watch?