Critics reviews

Like the best podcasts and radio plays, the stripped-down Danish thriller “The Guilty” paints such vivid pictures with words that, afterward, we’re not exactly sure what we saw and what was merely imagined. Imagination, though, is so rarely asked of movie audiences these days that the daring of the first-time feature director, Gustav Moller, can hardly be overstated.

The premise—with its emphasis on confinement and solitude—cries out for the squarish Academy ratio, but director Gustav Möller shot this in wide-screen for no good reason; the images, all but defined by their wasted space, tend to slacken the tension engendered by the narrative.

The viewer’s ability to follow a movie with the sound off is seen as proof of a director’s skill, but The Guilty, which could easily be a radio play or podcast, displays obvious talent on Möller’s part—from his direction of the large, unseen supporting cast to the background noise of sloshing tires and drumming rain that evokes both an unseen rainstorm and Asger’s own internal tumult.

Möller delivers a compelling narrative by artfully concealing bald truths until the very last possible second.

The tight concentration enhances both plot action and character revelation, and we’re obliged to listen more closely than we do in most movies. Along the way, blinks and eye-shifts and finger-tapping become major events. Still, The Guilty reminded me that every choice cuts off others, forces new choices, sets up constraints–and new opportunities. Film art is full of trade-offs.

Möller weaves in some surprisingly topical subtext about retributive justice and police brutality. . . . As Asger gradually comes to terms with his mistakes, Möller and co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen achieve the delicate balance of affording him vulnerability and empathy, but not sympathy. Rather than allowing its flawed protagonist an arc of redemption, The Guilty brings him to a poignant reckoning.

Its arthouse pedigree . . . is rather misleading: This is a genre picture, a crisp single-location thriller, and its merits are firmly superficial. But merits they are indeed. . . . The action is sweat-inducingly tense, and Möller has fun exhausting the creative potential of his desk-bound setting. It may amount to little, but it’s sleek, deft, and lively.

The most commercial movie playing in the festival’s first week, this tight, showy thriller gives it a much welcome blast of genre filmmaking. . . . The director Gustav Möller doesn’t dig deep, but he skims the surface with entertaining wit and finesse.

Despite the simple, drab setting, Möller makes this character’s emotional journey a visual and sonic one as well. . . . As [Asger] tries to hide his efforts from those physically around him, the frame becomes tighter, darker, the lighting more creative.