The Guilty begins with a wry fake-out that says everything about the mood of Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a policeman demoted to emergency dispatch for an unknown transgression. Gustav Möller opens the film with a close-up on Asger’s headset as he answers a call from a man simply moaning “help me.” Asger’s calm in attempting to assist the man is slowly revealed to be dismissive indifference to a man he accurately pegs as a drug addict who has gotten lost in his addled state. In Asger’s methodical dismantling of the man’s fears of abduction one senses the cop’s astute skill of deduction and practicality, but his coarse interactions hint at the arrogance and bitterness that landed him in this lowly job in the first place.
Asger’s uncaring attitude extends to several other calls before he receives a call from a woman, Iben (Jessica Dinnage), who initially sounds as if she dialed the wrong number. Carrying on a banal conversation with a confused, irritated Asger, the dispatcher moves to hang up when Iben suddenly drops casual mention of the street she’s currently on in a car. Intuiting Iben’s ostensible irrelevance as code, Asger picks up that the woman has been kidnapped and begins coaching her through providing him with information. Once again Asger proves his genuine abilities as a policeman, but in his shrewd interaction with Iben there is a look of barely disguised greed on his face, an indication that he is rushing to help her not out of moral or professional obligation but because he finally has a case he can sink his teeth into and, perhaps, rehabilitate his stalled career.
Möller approaches the myopic perspective of the emergency dispatcher with a calm that befits the detached setting. Instead of attempting to capture a sense of action via busy editing and clashing camera angles, the director allows shots to run long, attuned less to the accelerating tension of Iben’s plight than the nearly real-time reactions of Asger, whose attempts to triangulate the woman’s location using cell tracking, dispatched police cruisers and even a call to Iben’s home and a delicate conversation with her scared, extremely young daughter show how the protagonist handles stress and thinks on his feet. With his most significant costars restricted to only their voices, Cedergren has to handle all of the film on his shoulders, and the slight modulations he makes to Asger’s prickly nature, adding empathy, investment, panic and other emotions, is an impressive feat.
With Asger’s reactions guiding the narrative, the drama stems more from the manner in which Asger increasingly inserts himself in the hunt for Iben, at times demanding to be patched through to individual police cruisers or pushing to lead an ad-hoc investigation of a situation still unfolding. His incensed, antsy behavior earns him the suspicion of co-workers and the outright enmity of a police dispatcher, whose minimal patience with Asger’s attempts to give orders wears out almost immediately before she begins to castigate the man for acting above his pay grade. At times, Asger oversteps every legal jurisdiction in the book, actively jeopardizing any case that could be built against his chief suspect in Iben’s kidnapping by making taunting calls directly to the perceived perp, and his frantic, occasionally mocking tone betrays a man more interesting in clearing his own name than catching a criminal.
The Guilty is not the first film to tackle a procedural thriller from the caged-in perspective of a dispatcher, but it may be the only one that actually sticks to the rules and does not find an excuse to break out of its limited setting for an action-packed climax. At times, the film’s dedication to its conceit leads down some hackneyed rabbit holes, as when Asger’s otherwise harrowing call to Iben’s daughter lunges into overbearing obviousness when the child soberly asks Asger if her mommy will die like the protagonist’s manifested conscience. Far better, though, is the extent to which the film interrogates the upfront role Asger assigns himself in the search for Iben and her captor, and the way that he can take his quick thinking for objective facts and start passing judgments on people who have not been investigated. The growing concerns over whether Asger is searching for the truth or looking for facts that can fit his narrative propels the film’s final act, which brilliantly flips the script on bottle-episode procedurals that lament the limited ability of their heroes to intervene by ominously suggesting just how much they have the power to influence.
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