Thriller Thursdays: The Guilty - a Taut One-Room Thriller

Intro: In our weekly column, Thriller Thursdays, we recommend specially-curated thrillers that’ll send a familiar chill down your spine.

What is the mental state of a lonely man sitting alone by a large desk with a headset glued onto his head, speaking continuously to people in dire straits? Day in, day out, hearing disembodied beings speaking  in urgent, desolate, despairing voices. When somebody else’s world becomes their world, the danger faced by those on the other end of the call soon becomes their concern as well. And in some cases instead of becoming clinical, they unintentionally become emotional. And the difference between their help being sought and them seeking help starts to blur.

Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a cop, who is facing both a departmental inquiry and an existential crisis. As a viewer, one doesn't  know the exact details regarding the issues surrounding him until the film winds into a heart-pounding conclusion. But the viewers are given an idea that what he did was serious enough for him to be taken off his role as a police officer, and to be reassigned to taking 911 calls, until the matter of his mysterious misdemeanour is sorted out.

As he kills time, with often half-hearted and often aggressive attempts, to find resolutions to problems, he gets a most unusual phone call from a woman who is abducted. He deep dives rigorously to determine who she is, where she is and how her children are doing. Joe is neither a trained responder nor a clearheaded detached worker, and he gives the case an extraordinary amount of attention and priority. While his personal involvement and resolution to sort out the woman’s problem is way out-of-the-ordinary, a lot of his bulldozing is done out of some unresolved anger. Everything he says and does is coloured red with his reactive nature.  When he calls for help from various authorities to track the distressed woman and talks to California Highway Patrol and others, his anger results in him being forceful, aggressive, and needlessly insistent. Colleagues turn testy, words are exchanged, and Joe realises he can push but not shove. And that makes it worse, sitting as he does in an enclosed environment with just a phone to push for action. Symbolically there is a storm brewing in the city and things can only turn for the worst if not resolved expeditiously.

The film creates a pressure-cooker environment and has the entirety of its action confined in the closed penumbra of a dispatch room. One can hear people conversing with Joe, but can only see Joe and, sporadically, his co-workers. He shifts rooms for privacy but it does not stop the curtains from rising to the ways of an irrevocable march to truth. But as the story unravels, and the disembodied voices find their thrust and purpose and truths, it is almost as if the lonely room is populated with a multitude of characters, each with their own agenda and dynamics and truths. And Joe’s personal life and what he engenders in that room and what happens to him there, all combine in a smorgasbord of synchronicities.

In life, a lot of what lies hidden and questioning in us requires the hidden hand of destiny to find its reconciliation. The truth of what a character comments in the film, reverberates as its ironical leitmotif — “Broken people save broken people.”

This tense drama of voices would have been lesser if not for the verisimilitude of its voice actors. Both Riley Keough, as despairing, and Peter Sarsgaard, as reconciling, are exemplary in the essaying of their characters. As they are counterpoints to Jake’s steady disintegration and realisations, the film would have been lesser without them.

Clearly made during the height of the pandemic, and suiting the time's compulsions of distance and quarantine, it is a remake of a Danish film Den Skyldige (2018), but in every way is its own triumph. Antoine Fuqua, the director, is an alchemist as far as Jake Gyllenhaal goes because this would be their second outing together after Southpaw, and both are incredible collaborations.

And what can one say about Jake Gyllenhaal, who is in every way more chameleon than an actor. He hides behind roles in magical ways. Consequently, his choice of roles is completely eclectic, from Nightcrawler to Brothers, from Prisoners to Okja, he has done raw to menacing, tender to traumatised. His open vulnerability is his strength. And as he navigates the night in The Guilty, his aggression, his concern, his desperation swing seamlessly. His excessive involvement in the case is also a function of where he is emotionally and how desperate are the battles raging inside him. With him in every frame of the film, it was critical that the verisimilitude of the person and milieu didn't hit a false note. And as the twists come thick and fast in the film race to its denouement, it is almost with a shock one realises that all we saw was virtually one face, for 90 minutes.

The Guilty is both a thriller and an allegory of truth's triumphs, even as the battles being raged are all inside.

Trivia

• The Guilty was shot in 11 days during October 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The genesis of the original Danish film was a YouTube clip of a kidnapped woman calling an emergency dispatcher while her kidnapper sat nearby. The writer Möller was struck by how much an audio clip could convey on its own with no visual accompaniment. Möller was also inspired by a real 911 emergency call and the true-crime podcast, Serial. So, while the exact happenings of the plot and the characters are fictional, both Den Skyldige and its remake, The Guilty, are based on real elements from real crimes.

Netflix acquired worldwide rights to the film for $30 million. The film was streamed in 69 million households over its first month of release in October 2021 and was the top-watched film on the platform in 91 countries.

Watch The Guilty here .

(Views expressed in this piece are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent those of OTTplay)

(Written by Sunil Bhandari, a published poet and host of the podcast ‘Uncut Poetry’)