Jewish actor Jake Gyllenhaal delivers an outstanding turn in The Guilty, a Netflix remake of an award winning 2018 Danish crime thriller for which Gyllenhaal acquired the rights. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen) from a screenplay by True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatton, The Guilty features the voices of Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Paul Dano and Peter Sarsgaard.
The action takes place over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch call centre In Los Angeles, California. Call operator Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) is a disgraced cop who’s been placed in his current position whilst awaiting the verdict from a court hearing, which he hopes will clear his name. After receiving a series of distress calls from Emily ( Keough), a woman claiming to have been abducted, Joe goes above and beyond the call of duty to help save the woman form her ordeal.
Joe eventually discovers that nothing is quite as it seems, and comes to the conclusion that facing his own truth is his only option. Elsewhere, Joe’s best friend and former colleague Sgt. Bill Miller (Hawke) is having second thoughts about standing as a character witness for his friend. Christina Vidal (Sneaky Pete) is Sgt. Denise Wade, a stern but fair co-worker doing her best to understand the motivations of an increasingly distressed Joe.
Not usually known for his subtlety or understated directing style, Fuqua nevertheless delivers a tense, claustrophobic and genuinely engaging thriller about a man wrestling with his conscience. It is however Gyllenhaal’s peerless delivery that truly elevates this flawed adaptation into something really worth our time. The actor hasn’t been this good since his truly magnificent turn in Dan Gilroy’s psychological thriller Nightcrawler, a film about a troubled LA crime journalist.
If one is willing to ignore Fuqua’s slightly jarring, and frankly unnecessary docudrama style, The Guilty does a great job in building the suspense around a very clever set-up. That said, the film works better if you haven’t seen the original. All in all a robust delivery from Gyllenhaal who carries the film from start to finish, but nothing new has been added here to warrant the need for a remake.
