{"id":6234,"date":"2018-10-19T07:11:03","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T14:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=6234"},"modified":"2018-10-19T07:11:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T14:11:03","slug":"review-the-guilty-den-skyldige","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=6234","title":{"rendered":"Review: THE GUILTY (Den skyldige)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A model for the confined thriller, \u201cThe Guilty\u201d is an impressive feature debut for director Gustav M\u00f6ller.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"\"\"As a suspicious shooting is investigated, police officer Asger (Jakob Cedergren) is busted down to phone duty. On the eve of a hearing that is likely to exonerate him, Asger becomes entangled with a caller, who has been kidnapped. His long nights of taking calls from people, who have overdosed or have been robbed in the red light district, are suddenly upended with a real case. But all Asger can do is talk.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Guilty\u201d is a smart and efficient thriller that transpires in what appears to be realtime. Asger, who is dealing with an investigation into his actions, finds himself transformed by a caller\u2019s dilemma. That caller is a woman named Iben (voiced by Jessica Dinnage), who explains cryptically that she\u2019s been taken by a man and she fears for her life. Cleverly, Asger communicates with her, while trying to keep his true identity concealed from Iben\u2019s abductor. A strained cat-and-mouse game is played, and Asger must locate Iben carefully without making her dire situation worse. But what Asger discovers is not at all what it originally seemed.<\/p>\n

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Demonstrating the power of the unseen, director M\u00f6ller sets the entire film in just three or so rooms. Asger sits at a computer terminal wearing a headset taking emergency calls. We are introduced to the technology, as shots go from Asger to his computer, to his phone, and then to the room outfitted with banks of computers and other officers manning them. It\u2019s an interesting environment, and a place where human tragedy is played out daily, but not seen by those wearing the headsets.<\/p>\n

The frustration Asger experiences is palpable. He\u2019s an officer used to being out in the field, often with a gun at the ready. But once behind the computer, his real-world experience comes in handy. He has a sort of short-hand with those he calls upon for help. And like the other officers that he talks to, he knows the score. Some \u201cemergencies\u201d are nothing of the sort. But unless you have been in the thick of things more than once, unless you\u2019ve been around the bend a few times, you might take every non-emergency too seriously. This callous triage employed by Asger has made him jaded in ways he\u2019s yet to understand. But Iben, and her predicament, might help him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Captured tightly in a series of marvelous closeups, we see the transformation in Asger over the film\u2019s scant 85 minute running time. He is a man on the edge. Hounded by a newspaper reporter, who is frequently calling his cell phone for comment on the shooting, Asger\u2019s confidence is shattered. And worse, he\u2019s relegated to sitting behind a desk, when he, a man of action, should be out in there fighting injustice and bringing it like only a man of action can.<\/p>\n

Asger is played by Jakob Cedergren, a handsome, thin athletic actor, who could easily play the lead in an action-film, leaping and rolling, as he lets loose a barrage of bullets at the bad guys. But here, we see the other side, the credible reality that marks the best police work. Focus is paid closely to his face, his ears, and his eyes. We see the wheels turning, as he relies on his wits to comprehend Iben\u2019s plight. It\u2019s a nerve-wracking experience of a high degree.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What is impressive about \u201cThe Guilty\u201d is what it doesn\u2019t do. We never leave the confines of the phone center. We never see Iben. M\u00f6ller is committed to keeping us in the moment with Asger, to feel the pressure. And the film makes this claustrophobic narrative work. What this approach says about the state of the thriller genre as a whole is telling.<\/p>\n

This weekend, we see the release of the direct sequel to 1978\u2019s \u201cHalloween,\u201d a film that had its fair share of explicit violence, but by today\u2019s standards is relatively tame. That sequel\u2019s first half is marvelous, because it does not show us the violence, rather, just teases it, while building the tension. When the gore takes over, the tension is almost lost. \u201cThe Guilty\u201d shows us not one single moment of violence, instead, it is described. It\u2019s what we don\u2019t see that is truly the most horrific.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Guilty\u201d is a marvelous debut from Swedish director Gustav M\u00f6ller, who with his first film gets it. Sometimes, we don\u2019t have to see everything to be impacted meaningfully.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Director Gustav M\u00f6ller makes an impressive debut with confined thriller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[944,945,946,947,50,948,91],"class_list":["post-6234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-den-skyldige","tag-gustav-moller","tag-jakob-cedergren","tag-jessica-dinnage","tag-movie-review","tag-the-guilty","tag-thriller","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}