Director

Gustav Möller

Denmark | 2018 | 85 min | Danish, English

• Producer Lina Flint
• Production Company Nordisk Film Spring
• Screenplay Gustav Möller, Emil Nygaard Albertsen
• Cinematography Jasper J. Spanning
• Editing Carla Luffe
• Sound Oskar Skri
• Cast Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi, Johan Olsen, Jacob Hauberg Lohmann, Katinka Evers-Jahnsen, Jeanette Lindbæk.
• Contacts

  The Danish Film Institute (DFI),

  Malene Vincent

  www.dfi.dk

  dfi@dfi.dk

About the Film

The Guilty is an imaginative crime thriller with an innovative approach like no other. Officer Asger Holm, a detective demoted to deskwork, is assigned to the late night shift as an emergency dispatcher. This gruff and flawed character appears to have something to hide, or at any rate, something to be lived down.

As an emergency operator, Holm is impatient, judgemental and unsympathetic. All changes one night when he receives a panicked phone call from a kidnapped woman who then abruptly hangs up. Thus begins a white-knuckle drama that we experience almost entirely through voices and the sounds of the emergency center – tense, clipped orders and replies heard over the crackling police radio, viewed on a minimalist set with tight over-the-shoulder camera work of the protagonist. Officer Holm uses others as his eyes and ears in an increasingly desperate search for the victim and her abductors, trying to trace the crime back to its source. Meanwhile, the subplot unfolds, slowly revealing the reasons for our hero’s suspension.

Director Gustav Möller controls the tension as a conductor directs an orchestra; raising the level of anxiety and taut nervous energy ever upwards in the claustrophobic confines of the call center, the bleak visual setup in counterpoint to sound editor Okar Skriver’s perfectly tuned sonic background. This is Möller’s first feature film – artistically ambitious in its minimalistic choices of set, cast, and camera work, and its adherence to a real-time telling of the story.

Nicole Guillemet