Film Of The Month: The Guilty, A 911 Thriller On Police Misconduct Starring Jake Gyllenhaal
PUBLISHED November 10th, 2021 05:00 am | UPDATED July 25th, 2024 02:30 pm
Who will police the police? When the lives of a kidnapped woman and her baby are at stake, that hardly seems like a question to waste precious time on. In new-to-Netflix thriller The Guilty, Jake Gyllenhaal’s cop character Joe plays out this disturbing impulse to bend the law – precisely in his heroic pursuit to uphold it. No search warrant for the man suspected of murdering his baby? Just kick his door down. On a call with his sobbing wife held hostage in his car? Tell her to sneak up on him with a brick and bash his head in. After all, Joe urges, “he deserves it.” Or does he?
America has a notorious problem with power-abusing police officers, but The Guilty weaves it into a taut thriller with emotional complexity. Freshly premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2021, this American 911 drama is director Antoine Fuqua’s take on an acclaimed Danish hit of the same name. The remake stays largely true to the original narrative – with a few fleshed-out subplots that add poignant depth to Joe’s story.
Played with nail-biting intensity by Jake Gyllenhaal, Joe Baylor is a man haunted by demons from the get-go. An officer in the Los Angeles Police Department, he’s been demoted to handling 911 calls in a dispatch centre for an evidently serious offense. Between pleading to speak with his young daughter through his estranged wife and fending off pushy reporters, he has barely a scrap of patience left over for the LA public and their asinine problems. Responding to a panicked druggie, he cannot resist lecturing: “I understand, but it’s your own fault, isn’t it?”
All of that fades into background noise when a call comes through from a terrified woman in a van. Seemingly speaking in code to mislead her kidnapper, she can only whisper yes or no to Joe – but his detective savvy kicks in swiftly, allowing him to piece together the situation with just a few leading questions. Her crisis quickly consumes his attention to the point of frenzy, especially when he discovers her six-year-old daughter Abby has been left alone and frightened at home.
For a man in search of redemption like Joe, there’s only one thing to do: call in all the resources and personal connections he has to help her, professionalism be damned. By the time he gets to calling and threatening her husband – allegedly her kidnapper – it’s clear he’s made himself judge, jury, and executioner in this drama. Yet the whole time, he’s been grounded in the call centre, interpreting and driving the action only from afar. And his interpretation proves stunningly wrong – in potentially disastrous ways.
The Guilty takes its place in a great tradition of single-location thrillers, with all the action funneled through the phone and to the helplessly desk-bound Joe. The claustrophobic call centre setting does a phenomenal job of sharpening the suspense, and the sounds that come through over the line paint a hauntingly vivid picture. It’s only too late that we realise how constrained this viewpoint is – with tight closeups of Joe filling almost every frame of the film, we’re trapped in his troubled head as much as he is.
Despite the pulp thriller-style setup, The Guilty has interesting things to say about the problem of police abuse of power from a psychological angle. Despite Joe’s appalling misconduct, it’s easy to see his wannabe heroics in a sympathetic light – “Do you know who the police are? We’re protectors,” he soothes the tearful Abby at one point. But this isn’t a superhero movie, and the power to mete out justice – however satisfying – is best left in the hands of those without guns.
The Guilty is available for streaming on Netflix.
All photos courtesy of Netflix
