Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Guilty’ on Netflix, in Which Jake Gyllenhaal is a One-Man Actorly Wrecking Crew

Netflix movie The Guilty is Jake Gyllenhaal, all the time, every moment, up close and personal. This (mostly) one-man show is the American version of Gustav Moller’s Danish film Den skyldige, about a 911 operator dealing with a harrowing kidnapping situation via phone, while also staving off his own personal demons. Interesting trivia: Gyllenhaal, who also has producer credit, pitched director Antoine Fuqua by saying they’d shoot the film as a minimalist work, under tight COVID protocols, in five days; it actually took 11, which is still ridiculously quick for a feature. The result is as harrowingly intense as you’d expect for a drama that’s almost wholly close-up shots of Jake Gyllenhaal sweating buckets.

THE GUILTY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Wildfires are eating up large swaths of California right outside of Los Angeles. Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) coughs, hits his inhaler, exits the restroom and seats himself at a desk. He’s an LAPD officer, demoted, now manning a phone bank. As he answers 911 calls, we begin to wonder if there are any real, serious emergencies in the L.A. area — outside the fires, of course. Joe’s getting a lot of doozies tonight, and struggles to show much sympathy. “I understand, but it’s your own fault, isn’t it?” he asks one caller, and it’s not what the caller wants to hear, whether he’s a fool Joe suffers or just someone who’s truly hurt and needs help.

Then a call comes in on Joe’s personal cell phone. A newspaper reporter. They want an interview about his case — a case that goes to court the very next day. He yells at the reporter, hangs up. His phone’s home screen is a photo of his young daughter. He calls his ex, leaves a voicemail; he knows he’s not supposed to be doing this, but he just wants to say goodnight to the kid. He’s chastised for making a personal call on the job. He calls the LAPD dispatch, and gets his former sergeant (Ethan Hawke’s voice), who assures Joe that after tomorrow, he’ll be out of that call center and back to being a regular cop. Wishful thinking? Who knows, but Joe keeps hitting his inhaler, and snapping at his coworkers in the call center, and never saying please or thank you for anything, and now he’s just dropped some Alka Seltzer.

And then, the call. A woman named Emily (Riley Keough’s voice) is pretending to talk to her daughter, but she’s talking to Joe the 911 operator. She’s distraught. Soon enough, Joe deduces that she’s been abducted, and is in a white van on the highway. Then she hangs up. He barks orders at the California Highway Patrol dispatcher (Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s voice) and the CHP officers to find the van. He calls Emily’s daughter, who’s six, and home alone with her baby brother. He calls his former partner to go check things out. He gets a call from his ex but can’t answer it right now. Have they found the van? Is it the right one? Are there any cops out there not dealing with wildfire-related emergencies? What’s Joe’s damage, anyway? He sweats. His face is red. He promised the little girl that her mother would come home, but that’s going to be a mighty task, especially when you’re stuck behind a desk with only a telephone and a tenuous grip on your own sanity.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In Steven Knight’s Locke, Tom Hardy manages all kinds of personal and professional problems on the phone from behind the wheel of his car, pretty much in real time.

Performance Worth Watching: The film is 100 percent Gyllenhaal, so if you’re not watching him, you’ve dozed off — although Gyllenhaal gives the type of performance that does not at all encourage dozing off, so you’re absolutely watching him.

Memorable Dialogue: “Call an Uber and don’t bike drunk, asshole!” — Joe has no pity whatsoever for a poor 911 caller

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: If you’re going to watch a contrived high-drama acting exercise, you might as well watch Gyllenhaal do it: in close-up, eyes bulging, beads of sweat forming, forehead vein throbbing Beethoven’s 5th. He’s utterly convincing as a man who — no spoilers — probably did something pretty bad, and now is forced to solve a serious problem remotely when he used to be hands-on, on the frontline. Frustration boils, guilt emerges, self-loathing quietly bubbles up. But he’s heartbroken, regretful, truly concerned about this woman Emily’s well-being. Does Joe deserve our sympathy? I think so, if only to cling to idealist beliefs that good people sometimes do bad things, or that bad people deserve redemption. More realistically, I don’t see Joe as a good or bad person, but merely painfully human.

So beneath Gyllenhaal’s fraught, anxiety-ridden performance, there’s a character in the midst of a moral struggle: he’s done something wrong, now it’s time to do something right. There is nuance in Gyllenhaal’s characterization, although that doesn’t necessarily extend to the rest of the screenplay, which tries to encompass topical anxieties involving civilian-police interactions and environmental destruction — personal, social and global apocalypses all occur simultaneously. Gyllenhaal and Fuqua wind the tension tight, compelling us to get caught up in the drama, even when things get bleak or predictable, or bleakly predictable. It’s a bit too much, and a bit too much on the nose, but the film’s vigor is undeniable.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Guilty is a heavy, stressful watch, and if it isn’t too far-fetched, it’s at least a little bit fetched. Yet you can do far, far worse than watch Gyllenhaal work like this for 90 minutes.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Guilty on Netflix