The Guilty review – Jake Gyllenhaal anchors a taut single room thriller

Of all the recent foreign-language hits to get an American remake, it’s hard to think of many reasons to redo the 2018 Danish crime drama The Guilty. With its entire premise based around its status as a single room thriller, there’s not much space to expand the story’s scale or even to really give it the cultural makeover that can justify an American take. Regardless of this, Netflix has forged ahead, recruiting Antonie Fuqua to direct and Jake Gyllenhaal to star, and the results are a little better than you might expect – an excitingly twisty, if rather silly, cop drama that should solidly entertain anyone who hasn’t seen the original.

Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, an asthmatic and short-tempered California detective who, due to some initially undisclosed infraction, has been temporarily demoted to a 911 call centre. Joe’s working a late shift during a raging wildfire, leaving LA in a general state of panic, so he’s even more irritable than usual. Yet after a few dismissive calls (including one from a Paul Dano-voiced bigwig who’s reluctant to admit he’s been robbed by a prostitute), one grabs his full attention, as a distressed-sounding woman rings up and acts as if she’s talking to her young child back at home.

This is Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), and Joe quickly intuits her coded language to mean she’s been abducted, and so he furiously sets about finding her and her young kids. It’s a strong starting point, and in keeping the original film’s commitment to never seeing Emily’s case play out in person, we feel just as powerless and in the dark as Joe. The Guilty is never dull, even when Nic Pizzolato’s script really starts stretching credulity, and Fuqua keeps things taut and tense, wrapping the whole affair up in less than 90 minutes.

Naturally, this is mostly a showcase for Gyllenhaal, and he delivers with some enjoyably Big Acting, voice cracking and veins popping as the case gets more and more intense. It doesn’t stack up with his very best work, but he still has that proper movie star pull in every scene, even when it’s just him and a few computer monitors in a dark room. The rest of the – surprisingly starry – cast is almost exclusively heard over Joe’s phone (a few of the cast’s smaller names appear as Joe’s in-office co-workers), which is a mixed bag. Dano’s cameo is fun, and a brief call from Bill Burr as an irate club owner is a real treat, but Keough’s part is very indistinctive and a recurring role for Ethan Hawke just feels unnecessary.

The Guilty’s seeming complete disinterest in originality – a plot comparison between the 2018 original and this gives off pretty much no differences other than the character names – does hurt it, and in its moments of downtime it can seem pretty bland. Thankfully, it moves quickly enough, and throws enough left-turns at you, that this is more a problem in hindsight. It’s a short and mostly sweet ride, anchored by yet another star turn from one of the most reliably interesting leading men working today.

The Guilty is now showing in select cinemas and streaming on Netflix.