Phone-bound thriller that keeps you hanging on
The Guilty 15 cert, 85 min
Dir Gustav Möller Starring Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi, Johan Olsen, Jacob Lohmann, Katinka Evers-jahnsen
The Guilty is what TV executives used to call a “bottle episode” – a script confined to one tight location, traditionally for budgetary reasons, with everyone trying to make a dramatic virtue of the constriction at hand. Think back, on film, to a coffin-bound Ryan Reynolds in Buried, or Colin Farrell in Phone Booth, or Tom Hardy at the wheel of a car in Locke.
This Danish thriller about one long night for an emergency call operator also has a Hollywood counterpart in Halle Berry’s The Call, but at no point does our protagonist leave the call centre, or sprint off, like Berry, to take matters into his own hands. In fact, as we discover, he’s pretty capable of doing that armed only with a headset and the computer before him.
As the film starts, Asger (Jakob Cedergren) is evidently stressed out. Answering 999 calls all day will do that to a person, but there’s also a disciplinary hearing coming up overnight that is giving him special anxiety. He cycles through a few low-level emergencies – an in-car mugging in Copenhagen’s red light district, a mild overdose – with a huffy air of blaming the callers for their own mishaps, and barely interacts with the colleagues working either side of him.
Then a truly life-or-death call comes in. A mother called Iben, voiced by an unseen Jessica Dinnage, has been kidnapped in the back of a white van, and whispers to Asger in terror while pretending she’s on the phone to give reassurance to her daughter. He keeps the line open as long as he can, then feeds the details to local police, who try their best to intercept based on the radius of the signal on a motorway. Asger’s own involvement can only extend so far, and we quickly sense him overstepping that mark, as he calls around scrabbling for clues and getting co-workers to do his bidding.
The film’s taut construction, as the clock ticks towards the end of his shift, keeps us glued, but the writing lacks a third dimension that might make the gravity of the crisis come to life. When Asger dials through to Jessica’s six-year-old daughter, left home alone with her baby brother, everything she says feels necessarily scripted to raise the stakes, rather than an entirely believable child’s response. Mightn’t she ask Asger questions about himself, or burble just a few extraneous details?
Something else about Asger’s predicament doesn’t scan, which is how unattended he seems to be by any chain of command – especially for an employee being called into account for infractions and apparent hotheadedness already. Cedergren, the strapping lead of Thomas Vinterberg’s Submarino (2010) who has deserved better film roles since, is very good at naturally inhabiting a moment, with hardly a wasted gesture. Thanks to his credible underplaying, The Guilty stays afloat, but it never builds to the armrest-clutching peaks of suspense that the premise promises.