The Guilty
Den skyldige
Gustav Möller (2018)
The setting of Gustav Möller’s The Guilty is a police control room in Copenhagen. Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is on the evening shift there, answering emergency phone calls and initiating follow-up action to them. It quite soon emerges that Asger is due to appear in court the next day regarding an incident that led to his suspension from normal police duties and assignment to the control room. He takes a call from a woman, Iben (Jessica Dinnage), who seems to have been kidnapped by her estranged husband Michael (Johan Olsen). They’re on the road, in his van; their two young children are still at home. On Asger’s advice, Iben, as they converse, pretends to be talking to her six-year-old daughter so as not to arouse Michael’s suspicions. After his shift has ended, Asger moves into an adjoining office, where he continues to makes calls, on a police phone and on his own. When fellow police officers go to Ibn’s apartment, they find the other child, a baby boy, dead and apparently murdered.
From a call he makes to his colleague Rashid (Omar Shargawi), we learn that Asger’s wife has recently left him and that Rashid will be giving evidence – false evidence – on his behalf in court. The nature of the incident that caused Asger’s suspension isn’t revealed until a few minutes before the end of The Guilty. His reactions to the other calls he takes express near-contempt for the callers – among them, a drug addict and a man who’s been robbed in a red light district. This partly reflects Asger’s frustration with the demeaning job he’s currently doing. It’s soon clear that he’s used to issuing orders. In fact, he can’t stop doing so: preoccupied with trying to help Iben, he exceeds his control room responsibilities.
This Danish film takes place not only in a single interior location but also in virtually real time. Its effectiveness as a drama depends greatly on these two features. Of the four actors mentioned above, all except Jakob Cedergren are heard but never seen. The Guilty, written by the director and Emil Nygaard Albertsen, isn’t a work of great imagination. Though the plot is neatly constructed and worked out, it doesn’t come as a major surprise that Asger misunderstands Iben’s situation and, in trying to make things better, makes them worse. But the film is absorbing, commendably compact (85 minutes) and fortified by a fine lead performance. I saw The Guilty at Curzon Bloomsbury just an hour or so after watching Widows there. The intentional and intelligent claustrophobia of Möller’s movie was welcome after a term of imprisonment with Steve McQueen’s protracted, explosive, tumid one.
In a lukewarm review in the TLS, Adam Mars-Jones likens The Guilty to ‘a supercharged radio play rather than an authentically cinematic experience’. It’s true that, as Mars-Jones also says, the sound design is one of the film’s chief assets but the visual simplicity and immobility have a pull of their own. (A rare moment of dynamic movement is also a rare forced moment: Asger, eventually realising his mistake, furiously throws office furniture around in a way that seems bound to attract the attention of colleagues in the adjoining control room but doesn’t.) The Guilty is definitely a substantial screen experience. Whether it would lose anything as a television rather than a cinema piece is more arguable but the ambience of a film theatre certainly sharpens awareness of the piece’s formal distinctiveness in a way that a living-room armchair seat would not.
Mars-Jones describes Jakob Cedergren’s face as ‘blandly handsome’, which may largely explain why he found the film, in which that face is the dominant image, underwhelming. I’d be surprised if many viewers see the main actor as Mars-Jones does. Cedergren’s long, bony countenance has a deep-set belligerence that’s both interesting and intimidating. It’s obviously crucial that he doesn’t reveal things too quickly and he’s very good at encouraging us to read his character in different ways. Rightly so, because Asger’s motives are so mixed: in his efforts to help Iben, he’s trying to do the right thing, to resume the proper police work he’s been prevented from doing and, it gradually becomes clear, somehow to atone for the incident that’s landed him in court. It struck me as surprising that Asger was on duty on the eve of a morning court appearance but I didn’t find it hard to accept this is as dramatic necessity. Besides, it’s increasingly easy to believe that his prolongation of the control room stint is partly a means of postponing what’s in the diary the next day.
Michael and Iben turn out to be heading to a psychiatric hospital in Elsinore – a location that, for a non-Danish viewer anyway, brings Hamlet unhelpfully, almost comically, to mind. That’s hardly Gustav Möller’s fault, though, and he handles the closing stages splendidly. Just when Asger thinks he’s responsible for another death, a voice on the other end of the phone tells him that Iben is safe and congratulates Asger on his good work. In the film’s last scene, as he prepares to exit the control room area, he makes one more phone call – to whom we don’t know: the call hasn’t been answered by the time the screen goes dark. This concluding attempt to make contact makes emotional sense. The events of the evening may have finished Asger’s career. Yet the experience, including what he confesses to Iben, is also cathartic. He leaves the office both more and less isolated than he was when the shift began.
13 November 2018