Jake Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor, a demoted police officer stuck at a 911 desk, in Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 2018 Danish thriller The Guilty. He receives a call from a kidnapped woman and spends the next hour and a half tracking her van, her father, and a missing child while his own court hearing looms over a prior incident. The film moves fast, mostly through phone calls, and it asks you to care about a man whose career is on the line while a woman is in real danger.
Trailer, via Netflix.
The Phone Game
Gyllenhaal is the entire show. He talks to a six-year-old girl named Abby, to her father Henry Fisher, to a sergeant named Miller, and to a van that never arrives. The camera stays on his face and his hands, and he makes it work. The film has little else to hold onto, so it leans hard on his ability to carry tension through a conversation and a stare. It mostly earns that trust.
The other characters exist only as voices on the line. Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard, and the rest of the cast deliver lines from a booth, not a scene. That is the point, but it also limits the movie. Abby’s fear and Henry’s guilt are conveyed through words alone, and the film trusts the audience to infer the body language and the room behind the calls. That trust pays off some of the time and fails whenever the stakes need to feel physical.
What Holds Up
The central performance carries the film. Gyllenhaal’s Joe Baylor is a man doing a job he no longer believes in, and the phone calls let him show that exhaustion without ever leaving his chair. The script, written by Nic Pizzolatto, keeps the story moving without much room for subplots or character beats outside the calls. That is a fair trade, since the story depends on keeping you in the single room with him.
The film’s strengths, ranked by how much they matter to the final score:
- Gyllenhaal’s performance, which anchors the whole picture.
- The tight, compact runtime, which keeps the story from dragging.
- The premise, which gives the film a reason to exist.
- Pizzolatto’s writing, which holds the tension through the middle stretch.
The weaknesses are real. The remake is inferior to the original film, and the movie never quite earns the claim that its technical problems are the point. You are watching a man in a chair in the dark, and for stretches the film cannot make that feel urgent enough to justify the setup.
The Verdict
The Guilty is a tight, well-acted thriller that leans on one man’s phone calls to hold together a story about a man whose career is on the line and a woman who is in real danger. Jake Gyllenhaal makes it work most of the time, but the film’s reliance on phone calls keeps it from feeling like much more than a showcase for his face and voice. It is a strong performance in a thin container.
Score: 6.3/10. A solid piece of work that justifies its existence without quite becoming something worth remembering.
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