Bleak are the boundaries of Justice, no matter what the regulations may say, with the laws that think of defining, regimenting every variant of human behavior, and consequently punishing with precision every error, every derailment, every fault. The Guilty is the title of the beautiful thriller distributed by Netflix, which comes to make us question, to sow doubts. We meet Joe Baylor while he’s at the 911 switchboard, collecting and sorting all the distress calls. After a very short time we understand that the man was a street agent and suffers from demotion behind a desk and that something heavy has happened, to reduce him, tense and on the verge of a crisis. In the alienating distance from the real and fictitious emergencies that hit him, he is required to be able to sift through, distinguish, catalog cases.
With resigned gloom Joe the man performs his task, with professional coldness, with due detachment. Until he takes a phone call that little by little involves him more and more. A woman calls him from a car, she has been kidnapped by her husband who is taking her who knows where, there are children abandoned in a house, who knows where, there are few clues to find her, to prevent the affair from escalating into tragedy. In Joe the detective wakes up, the employees he addresses take charge of the situation but invite him to let them take care of it from there on.
However, he continues to search, the computer screen locates the calls, helps to trace license plates and addresses. In his ears only background noises, other switchboards, other offices, and the woman who calls him and her crying and the desperate daughter and the husband determined not to stop and the traffic and the doors and the doors slamming. Stuck behind his desk, he can’t leave his desk, he locks himself in an office, skips his shift, is called back by the boss, looked at with suspicion by his colleagues.
But he investigates, discovers details, which he communicates to the external steering wheels, above all he gets more and more involved and becomes the actor of the action in progress, convinced that he has the pulse of the situation. The regulations would forbid him but his policeman spirit makes him bite the brake. From his office Joe seems to enter reality, or what makes him see the perception he may have of it. Who is right, who is wrong, in the drama that is unfolding on the other side of the telephone cables, and above all Joe did it right or wrong? Who will ultimately be the culprit?
The Guilty is the faithful remake of a 2018 Danish film, which was once selected to compete for the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. If at other times, on the occasion of made in USA remakes of successful foreign films, we had complained about a heavier tone, as if they wanted to add more fat and spices to a simple dish that was considered unsuitable for the American palate, this time the note is not can do because the original script (by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen) was so perfect that Nic Pizzolato, the man to whom we owe True Detective, left it as it is, without increasing anything, only updating it to the displacement from Denmark of the storms of snow at the California of the summer fires.
Even the direction of Antoine Fuqua, often more emphatic and melodramatic, is sober and respectful of the original, all indoors, centered on the protagonist’s close-ups. Who here is the much more charismatic and talented Jake Gyllenhaal. The other actors, only voices in the ether, are Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard and Ethan Hawke.
You will love The Guilty if you haven’t seen the original, because it’s a great thriller that earns a place of honor in the “phoned” movie category (Locke, Cellular, In line with the killer, Buried), in the sense that the narration develops exclusively thanks to a conversation between the two opposites of the device invented by our Antonio Meucci. In case you have seen the original, it will unfortunately not surprise you, but it will be appreciated for the interpretation of Jake Gyllenhaal, who holds the whole film on his face. Anxiously laced, exciting up to three quarters, The Guilty is then enriched by a further twist that makes you fully understand the title and the dilemma we were talking about. Who saves a life saves himself?
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