Movie Review: The Guilty
Rating: 2 Stars
Conceptually I love the challenges a movie like The Guilty presents. The challenge presented for Training Day director, Antoine Fuqua, is how he can present the tension of being a member of law enforcement on dispatch duty.
The first hurdle is having an actor who can hold your attention for 90 minutes. Jake Gyllenhaal had to be an easy casting decision.
The film is shot almost entirely within the dispatch call center as the camera revolves around Gyllenhaal who plays disgruntled police officer, Joe Baylor. Baylor has been given dispatch duty on account that he has an upcoming hearing for a reason that the audience isn’t privy to until later in the film.
The Guilty builds tension off of Baylor’s dark secret, but the film is ultimately driven by a call he gets from Emily Lighton (voiced by Riley Keough), who subtly reveals she’s been abducted by her husband. Lighton and her husband are never shown. There is one out-of-place cut to the van they are traveling in.
There’s a lot of power in removing the sense of sight from a situation. What one cannot see completely changes the context of how a situation can be interpreted. In essence, The Guilty is a high-stakes game of ‘telephone’. Joe puts too much of himself in the situation and only burrows deeper as the abduction further spirals out of his control.
Gyllenhaal pulls on some of the same threads that made his Nightcrawler performance so memorable. Baylor is patently unlikeable as he berates coworkers and allows his conflating stresses to overcome him. Despite his misgivings, you’re forced into pulling for Baylor to set his demons aside and save Lighton.
The confined space is an opportunity to analyze all of Gyllenhaal’s facial expressions. Inadvertently, Gyllenhaal may have provided our soon-to-be AI overlords with enough facial data to recreate his appearance in films for centuries to come. I think we’ll all sarcastically look forward to the Prince of Persia reboot in 20 years time.
It is well worth noting two things. The Guilty is based on a 2018 Danish film of the same name. Wikipedia believes that the Danes got it right. Second, the film was filmed during the COVID pandemic. It was a worthy experiment during a time where one set and a limited cast made sense.
The Guilty unfortunately is upended by a cheap twist, Baylor’s uninspiring reveal, and some questionable writing throughout. I get the sense that there’s a social commentary within The Guilty that struggles to resonate with a general audience. I gather there’s some assessment of police psychology that I gathered but it doesn’t match up with the film’s nonsensical twist.
The Guilty calls much to its attention of Lighton’s abduction but the true ask is to stay connected with the plight of Baylor. I could see a casual audience getting upset with the minor details when The Guilty wasn’t trying to be a film about what it’s like to work as a dispatch officer. In that case, The Guilty needed to be assessed from a different angle, but the concept always had promise.
