The Guilty is yet another movie that I knew nothing about going in. I actually didn’t even know that Jake Gyllenhaal was in it until Facebook heard me talking about watching the movie and threw me an article naming him in the headline. So, I mean, it must be a good movie if Jake Gyllenhaal is in it, right?

Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) is a LAPD officer working the 9-1-1 call center. This doesn’t seem to be his usual job. It seems like he has been put on “desk duty” for some unknown reason. While answering calls, he is either angry or dismissive toward the people calling him for help. Until he gets a call from Emily (Riley Keough). He believes that she has been abducted. Joe stays after his shift is over, talking with various members of the California Highway Patrol and the LAPD in order to find Emily and save her family.

This year is the year of the pandemic movie. The Guilty has a small handful of actors in person (I think there are 5 or 6 total) who are spaced fairly far away from each other. All of the other characters are only voices. As a matter of fact, the director (Antoine Fuqua) had contact with a Covid-19 positive person and directed the entire film from a van. It gives the whole movie this weird disconnected feel. You can see people are there but they aren’t really interacting with each other. It’s kinda creepy.

Unfortunately, that is the only creepy thing about this movie. Netflix has it listed as a thriller. I didn’t think there was anything particularly thrilling about it. I had a difficult time understanding a lot of the dialog because it’s almost entirely over a phone (there are, I think, three characters that Joe talks to in person) and a majority of the characters are either sobbing or screaming. It can be difficult to understand what someone is saying when they are crying and you can see their face. It’s almost impossible when the conversation is over a phone, which would have been a great commentary on the difficulties of working in a 9-1-1 call center but Joe didn’t seem to have a lot of trouble understanding her. (He had the script, duh.)

To be honest, I found a lot of the movie really boring. I completely understand the restrictions placed on the production due to the pandemic. However, this is a remake of a 2018 Danish movie, which was made before the pandemic and still involves mostly voice-overs. A lot of reviews say the original was much better. For one, the set is dramatically different. In the 2021 version, the call center has giant screens showing news footage around California (mostly of wildfires). The 2018 version has them sitting in a small drab office, which is closer to reality. I’m not sure if the original is available to stream in the US but I am definitely interested in seeing it. It can’t be any worse than this, right?