The Guilty (2018)

There is a particular strain of cultural criticism that must be applied even to a Danish thriller shot in thirteen days for half a million euros, and so we turn our attention to The Guilty, a film so rigorously confined to a single dispatch room that its entire cast is essentially a collection of voices on a telephone. The setup is elegantly lean. Asger Holm, a Copenhagen officer awaiting a hearing for a fatal shooting, answers emergency calls and becomes entangled in the apparent abduction of a woman named Iben. What follows is a procedural of escalating dread, and the film never once stops to inform the audience how to feel about it. This is a rarity.

On the matter of representation, the film offers Omar Shargawi as Rashid, a colleague whose ethnicity registers on screen and then evaporates entirely, unremarked and unexploited. This is casting that reflects a real Danish police force without turning the man into a thesis statement. We can assign it a sliver of credit and move on. Elsewhere, the ledger is blank. There is no gender critique, no racial reckoning, no environmental sermon, no class warfare, no celebration of body diversity, and no advocacy of any kind regarding mental illness, which here functions as a tragic plot mechanism and nothing more. The film's treatment of Iben's psychiatric history is a reveal, not a position paper. It has no interest in instructing us.

What remains is craft. A kidnapping thriller that trusts its audience to keep up, that lets a man confess his worst act into a telephone receiver and then simply stands up from his desk and walks out of the building. No lesson is appended. No messaging is delivered. The camera just watches him go, and the colleagues watch him go, and the credits arrive without apology. We are left with the quiet satisfaction of a film that had something to say about guilt and chose to say it through a man's voice cracking on a phone line instead of through a monologue about society. Refreshing, in its austere way.