On July 11, see 2018 Danish crime thriller The Guilty /Den Skyldige (dir. Gustav Möller, Denmark, 2018), which was in 2021 was remade as the Netflix film The Guilty, starring and produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. When police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is demoted to deskwork, he expects a sleepy beat as an emergency dispatcher. But that all changes when one night he receives an emergency call from a kidnapped woman — who states that she is currently being driven out of Copenhagen against her will — and he embarks on an increasingly hair-raising journey to probe the mystery by any means necessary.
As he uses others as his eyes and ears to bring the missing woman to safety, a ticking clock and his own personal demons conspire against him, and the search to find her and her assailant will take every bit of his intuition and skill.
In this innovative and unrelenting Danish thriller that uses a single location to great effect, director Gustav Möller expertly frames the increasingly messy proceedings against the clean Scandinavian sterility of the police department, while Cedergren’s strong performance places the audience squarely in Holm’s tragically flawed yet well-intentioned mindspace. Shortlisted as the Danish submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, The Guilty was hailed as “a masterclass in wringing breathless tension from just a few key ingredients” (Wendy Ide, Observer).
“Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways.” —New York Times
“Gustav Möller’s short, taut debut feature never leaves the claustrophobic confines of the call center, but builds a vivid aural suspense narrative through the receiver, all while incrementally unboxing the visible protagonist’s own frail mental state.” —Variety
About Gustav Möller
Gustav Möller (b. 1988) was educated in film at the Danish Film School and graduated in 2015. For his student film In Darkness (2015), he won the Next Nordic Generation award.
His feature debut, the psychological thriller The Guilty (2018), had its world premiere at Sundance, and was supported by the Danish Film Institute (DFI). It has won several awards and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.