The Guilty (2021) – Film Review

This film was screened for me as part of my series for the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.

A troubled police detective named Joe Bayler (Jake Gyllenhaal) demoted to 911 operator duty scrambles to save a distressed woman named Emily Lighton (Riley Keough) during a harrowing day of revelations — and reckonings.

Antoine Fuqua‘s The Guilty is being billed as a ninety-minute tightly-wound thriller about one man’s struggle to save a kidnapped woman from imminent danger and that’s exactly what it is – nothing more, nothing less. Don’t go into this movie expecting it to be some big Oscar movie or anything, but you should expect to feel quite a bit of tension in this relentlessly paced movie, based on a Danish film of the same name which, sadly, I have yet to see.

I was a little hesitant to see The Guilty mainly because of the fact that it was directed by Fuqua. Don’t get me wrong, he has certainly directed some good stuff in the past such as Training Day and Southpaw, but at the same time he has also directed his fair share of trash such as Olympus Has Fallen and just this year, Infinite, which was an incredibly bland and unimaginative science-fiction film that had a couple of promising ideas but sadly, they just weren’t well realized at the end of the day.

But I will admit that I was quite eager to see Jake Gyllenhaal in a brand new film again because the last time I saw him in a movie was Jon Watts‘ Spider-Man: Far From Home in the summer of 2019, so watching The Guilty, it was genuinely fun to see Gyllenhaal back in action again. And what I will say is that as Joe Bayler, Gyllenhaal delivers his most chaotic and high-energy performance in several years – perhaps since Nocturnal Animals, actually.

It’s been proven time and time again that if you give Gyllenhaal the right material to work with, he will make any director happy and get the job done. But most importantly, he will get the job done right, and here, he does exactly that. Almost every single aspect of The Guilty revolves around the character of Joe Bayler and how on-edge he is throughout the entire story. He’s a 911 dispatcher and he knows what he’s doing but certain callers get under his skin a little more than others, and that’s clearly evident when he gets a call from a kidnapped woman named Emily Lighton.

We aren’t exactly sure why he prioritizes this case so much but we understand that Joe is going to stop at absolutely nothing to get to the bottom of the situation and find out where she is. Because she is kidnapped in the back of a vehicle, she has no idea what the license plate number is and where exactly she is which understandably makes things ten times harder for Joe and the rest of the police department. From the moment The Guilty begins all the way up to its final few minutes, it tells this one, singular, impressively tense story that almost never lets up.

But as interesting and entertaining as a film it is, for whatever reason, it lacks the punch that it should’ve had and it is disappointingly devoid of any true depth. There isn’t a super juicy story behind this one small kidnapping case that Joe is investigating and the characters have absolutely zero development throughout.

If you want to watch a movie that has some multi-layered story full of twists and turns, you should probably stay away from this one because you’ll probably be greatly disappointed but if you’re fine with watching a small, contained thriller taking place almost entirely in one room than you probably will get a kick out of The Guilty which is admittedly a lot of fun, it’s just not as juicy as it could’ve been. If anything, you should watch this movie for Gyllenhaal’s unhinged performance alone. As Joe Bayler, he feels genuinely scary and intimidating in every single scene and you can almost feel his rage and frustration seeping off the screen. It’s not an excellent film, but it gets the job done.