The Guilty Review

Everything here was built to be small. Antoine Fuqua shot the film in eleven days with his lead sealed in a booth, and the design is one man, two phones and a wall of screens. Gyllenhaal plays a demoted cop working the dispatch desk the night before his hearing, and he is committed to the point of strain. That is the problem. Gustav Moller's Danish original worked because Jakob Cedergren stayed clamped shut and made the listener assemble the unseen crime themselves. Fuqua pushes the camera in, hangs an orange wildfire glow outside the windows, and lets a score announce when dread is due, and every one of those additions does work that silence was already doing better.

The voices are strong. Riley Keough gives the call from the van a real disorientation and Peter Sarsgaard gets more from a few crackling lines than the images manage all night. The structural reveal still lands because it is a good reveal, borrowed intact. What the remake supplies on its own is underlining: a call home that states the theme aloud, a closing confession pitched to the back row. Ninety minutes, and it still feels padded.