the guilty danish movie review

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The Guilty Reviews

Playing out in ‘real’ time, the film feels refreshing and unpredictable. We almost forget that this is a film, and not real life unfolding before our very eyes. Please remember, that this is just a film and don’t forget to breathe.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2024

“The Guilty” is a refreshing film that engages the imagination instead of dumbing things down and taking the safe route.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2023

It’s an impressive debut from Swedish filmmaker Gustav Möller, who uses his single location superbly. He isolates Asger within the frame as the tensions build and uses pauses and telephone silence to ratchet up the anxiety.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2023

The Danish film “The Guilty” is the latest glowing example of how great writing and a good actor’s steely intensity is more than enough for a genuinely gripping thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Despite the film taking place in a few drab rooms filled with computer monitors and coworkers out of focus in the background, it somehow manages to be uncommonly engaging.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 2, 2022

Films contained in a single location like this only works efficiently when you've got a sharp, astute script... how refreshing to see a film where the writing is the best special effects.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2021

Episode 23: Vox Lux / The Guilty / Shoplifters / The Mule / Rififi

Full Review | Original Score: 82/100 | Sep 3, 2021

...compulsively watchable...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 2, 2020

There are some startling yet credible twists, and Cedergren's performance gradually reveals complex layers in a character who at first seems anything but complicated, or sympathetic.

Full Review | Oct 22, 2020

Its simplicity sometimes dips into shallowness, but for most of its 85 minutes, The Guilty is quiet and self-assured.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020

It's Oedipus Rex minus the incest, replacing the hubris of royal prerogative with that of state authority (and of straight White maleness).

Full Review | Jul 1, 2020

This Danish potboiler is organized around a few nimbly executed plot twists, and like many similarly designed thrillers, it leaves the audience with little to think about once all the surprises have been revealed.

Full Review | Apr 13, 2020

Combining Sorry, Wrong Number's radio-drama appeal and Locke's claustrophobic tension, The Guilty might be the best film of [the 2018 Florida Film Festival].

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 20, 2020

First-time director Gustav Möller is able to overcome the cookie cutter plot to reveal some hard truths about law enforcement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2019

Writer-director Gustav Müller's feature-film debut is a nerve-shredding hell on wheels.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 23, 2019

The Guilty works better as an experiment than a full movie. There just isn't enough going on that's interesting to keep the audience engaged.

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | May 16, 2019

Here, physical space creates a figurative space of mental anguish, so while the protagonist tries to avert an exterior crisis he's swallowed whole by his own internal turmoil.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 1, 2019

[A] captivating story. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 26, 2019

As a character study, the film is extremely effective. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 25, 2019

A wonderful surprise. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2019

Supported by

Review: ‘The Guilty’ Places a Troubled Police Officer on Hold

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Oct. 18, 2018

Like the best podcasts and radio plays, the stripped-down Danish thriller “The Guilty” paints such vivid pictures with words that, afterward, we’re not exactly sure what we saw and what was merely imagined.

Imagination, though, is so rarely asked of movie audiences these days that the daring of the first-time feature director, Gustav Moller, can hardly be overstated. Locking the viewer in two cramped, drab rooms, he builds suspense with little more than a single character and a few voices on a telephone. But the ingenious screenplay (by Moller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen) reaches beyond the solving of a mystery to paint a psychological portrait of the man at its center.

That would be Asger Holm (an astonishing Jakob Cedergren), a resentful police officer demoted to emergency-response telephone duty while waiting for an unspecified disciplinary proceeding. Calmly contemptuous of his callers’ minor crises, Asger snaps out of his boredom when a terrified woman contacts him, claiming to have been kidnapped by her ex-husband. Discarding the rules that require him to simply relay the information to field officers, Asger resolves to stay on the case, frantically using his detecting skills while concealing his efforts from the dispatchers around him.

Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study. What’s happening on the end of Asger’s phone line is gripping enough, but what’s happening inside his head — illuminated by Jasper Spanning’s almost abusive close-ups — is every bit as fascinating.

Rated R for — what else? — language. In Danish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

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IMAGES

The Guilty (2018) Review: Unique, tense, and stunning Danish film is one of year's best
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The Guilty (Dänemark 2018)
The Guilty (2018)
The Guilty / Den skyldige (2018)

VIDEO

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