* * * * (out of five)
Gustav Möller’s police thriller The Guilty is a must-see: an hour and twenty-five minutes of lean gripping cinematic heaven. The razor-tight, superbly plotted, intricate and surprising screenplay, by Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen, hurls us into a terrifically difficult situation, then challenges every aspect of our response. It’s very, very clever.
Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is a Copenhagen cop assigned, not necessarily happily, to night duty on the alarm dispatch line. There are issues at play with Asger, not entirely understood by us, perhaps not even by him. After deftly setting up his precarious situation and state of mind, Möller lets the telephone ring and Asger take an emergency call. He then deals with it, in real time, as our jaws clench, our guts twist, and our fists grip ever tighter on our armrests.
Like Steven Knight’s masterful Locke (2014), this is almost a single-location, single-actor film; there are the voice actors on the phone (all excellent) and some minor other characters, but the bulk of the screen time is spent on Cedergren’s face. A lot is resting on his performance, but he’s magnificent. Möller moves the camera around the single police station location enough to dispel any “staginess” while adhering to a worthy self-imposed discipline. It’s an intense, thoroughly well constructed ride.
I saw this as my final film at the 2018 Sydney Film Festival, with an audience of 2,000. It felt like we were all at the end of a long slog of film-going, ready, frankly, for the festival to be over, and perhaps didn’t know too much about what we were about to see. As the film played, I could feel it grip this jaded audience with an iron fist; gasps at the script’s magnificent twists and turns were audible throughout the vast theatre. As the final credits rolled, we all sat, stunned and silent. A man on a telephone had faced a dilemma, and through him, so had we all.