← Back to Reviews
in
The Guilty
Fans of the Tom Hardy film Locke will have a head start with 2021's The Guilty, a claustrophobic and squirm worthy crime drama about a man trying to save four lives while his own is falling apart.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Baylor, a police officer who has been demoted to a job as a 911 dispatch operator. The morning that we meet Joe, we watch him take a call from a distraught woman named Emily who sounds terrified of the man we hear in the background. It's not long before Joe figures out that this woman is being kidnapped and further investigation from Joe puts together that the man is her ex-husband, the father of her two children, and a convicted felon.
As this is taking place, we also learn that Joe lost his job as a police officer because of some serious misconduct that has his partner prepared to lie for him and Joe due in court the next morning. We also learn that Joe has been separated from his wife for six months and she is trying to keep him away from his daughter. It is the eventual collision of this family kidnapping and Joe's personal life that make for the drama of criminal and personal dysfunction that unfolds in front of us.
The Oscar-worthy screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, the creative force behind True Detective is so delicately crafted because it seamlessly blends two tragic stories with rich backstory but provides said backstory in such meticulous fashion that we are almost halfway through the film before we know everything that is going on. As we are introduced to Joe in the bathroom using his asthma inhaler, we get the feeling we're about to see a story about a former cop who hates his new job and there is an element of that here, but there's so much more going on here. As Tom Hardy did in Locke, Gyllenhaal's character has the most time onscreen and the other major characters in the story we only hear on the phone,
The introduction to the procedures for being a 911 operator were interesting to witness because some of said procedures initially impede what Joe is trying to do because he finds that a lot of the investigative techniques he knew as a cop were helpful to him, but were beyond his pay grade as a 911 operator and we feel his frustration. It was fascinating watching Joe trying to keep people on the phone when he needed to and, more importantly, have them hold the line when he needed them to. The scenes where Joe is trying to talk to Emily's daughter were heartbreaking.
Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day provides tight direction that keeps the story moving, despite the claustrophobic atmosphere created by the setting. He gets solid assist from his editing and sound units. Jake Gyllenhaal provides the strongest performance I have seen from him since Nightcrawler that anchors this gut-wrenching story. Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, Eli Goree, Riley Keough, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph also effectively led their voices to other roles in the story. A tight and sometimes stomach-churning drama that wraps in a very tidy 90 minutes.
Fans of the Tom Hardy film Locke will have a head start with 2021's The Guilty, a claustrophobic and squirm worthy crime drama about a man trying to save four lives while his own is falling apart.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Joe Baylor, a police officer who has been demoted to a job as a 911 dispatch operator. The morning that we meet Joe, we watch him take a call from a distraught woman named Emily who sounds terrified of the man we hear in the background. It's not long before Joe figures out that this woman is being kidnapped and further investigation from Joe puts together that the man is her ex-husband, the father of her two children, and a convicted felon.
As this is taking place, we also learn that Joe lost his job as a police officer because of some serious misconduct that has his partner prepared to lie for him and Joe due in court the next morning. We also learn that Joe has been separated from his wife for six months and she is trying to keep him away from his daughter. It is the eventual collision of this family kidnapping and Joe's personal life that make for the drama of criminal and personal dysfunction that unfolds in front of us.
The Oscar-worthy screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, the creative force behind True Detective is so delicately crafted because it seamlessly blends two tragic stories with rich backstory but provides said backstory in such meticulous fashion that we are almost halfway through the film before we know everything that is going on. As we are introduced to Joe in the bathroom using his asthma inhaler, we get the feeling we're about to see a story about a former cop who hates his new job and there is an element of that here, but there's so much more going on here. As Tom Hardy did in Locke, Gyllenhaal's character has the most time onscreen and the other major characters in the story we only hear on the phone,
The introduction to the procedures for being a 911 operator were interesting to witness because some of said procedures initially impede what Joe is trying to do because he finds that a lot of the investigative techniques he knew as a cop were helpful to him, but were beyond his pay grade as a 911 operator and we feel his frustration. It was fascinating watching Joe trying to keep people on the phone when he needed to and, more importantly, have them hold the line when he needed them to. The scenes where Joe is trying to talk to Emily's daughter were heartbreaking.
Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day provides tight direction that keeps the story moving, despite the claustrophobic atmosphere created by the setting. He gets solid assist from his editing and sound units. Jake Gyllenhaal provides the strongest performance I have seen from him since Nightcrawler that anchors this gut-wrenching story. Peter Sarsgaard, Ethan Hawke, Eli Goree, Riley Keough, and Da'Vine Joy Randolph also effectively led their voices to other roles in the story. A tight and sometimes stomach-churning drama that wraps in a very tidy 90 minutes.