The Guilty

"The first film by 30-year-old Gustav Möller is a concentrated dose of amphetamine-fuelled tension. We never leave the call centre, we never see the victims, the camera never leaves the room, and yet we are glued to the screen. Everything takes place under the neon lights of a cold room, with a chilling rage underpinning the imagery. Actor Jakob Cedergren, present in every shot, is utterly possessed, and directed with the precision of a maniacal craftsman. Whilst somewhere out there, a drama is unfolding in which the culprits (The Guilty) may not be who we think they are, the film shifts from the harsh, impersonal light of the alert room to the semi-darkness of a neglected office. Möller and his screenwriter, Emil Nygaard Albertsen, achieve the impossible: they reinvent a dead genre. From René Clément’s Les Maudits (The Damned) (1945) to Joel Schumacher’s Phone Game (2002), via Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and David Fincher’s Panic Room (2002), the suffocating closed-room setting has been used, reused – and worn thin. It was Sidney Lumet’s high-tension drama Twelve Angry Men (1957) that inspired Möller. A wise choice: everything in The Guilty, from the visuals, to the sound and the atmosphere, is subjected to constant dramatisation. The sense of urgency builds with an exquisitely subtle sound design. Little by little, the imagery captures the shadows. Asger’s face cracks under the weight of his mistakes and his necessary redemption. Out there, somewhere, in the night, humanity sinks into an unforgivable crime. Here, in the cinema, the viewer is galvanised." (François Forestier; nouvelobs.com)