The Guilty

Once more to the Luna in Leederville to see The Guilty, a Danish real-time thriller set in a police  emergency dispatch office. It's directed by first-timer, Gustav Moller and stars Jacob Cedergren and.....well, he's pretty much it, aside from a handful of voices over the phone. This may sound a bit boxed-in, a bit restricted, but that's the point of the film. It plays on the audience's helplessness by NOT showing us anything except Cedergren's character, Asger's creeping sense of futility.

Sensibly, there's more at play than just an emergency and the problems of Asger himself run somewhat parallel to the abduction that pivots the film. Slices of information are fed to the viewer at intervals regarding what has happened (and what is about to happen) to Asger and this leaves us to build the flanking narratives as they occur. Setting this film in a couple of rooms makes it tricky to show the 'action' but Moller has dealt with this by regular slow zooms into Asger's implacably resolute face while nailing the timing of the calls or interruptions.

The Guilty joins a select list of films that run in real time. Not one continuous shot, like Victoria or Russian Ark (or edited one shot's, like Rope or Birdman) but films that play out in the exact time it takes us to watch them. High Noon does it, but the scale is greater. 12 Angry Men gets a little closer to the cramped feeling of The Guilty, United 93 possibly even closer. Locke is set in a car (haven't seen, so can't really judge) but I reckon Phone Booth takes the biscuit for real-time claustrophobia films. Pretty niche genre, I know.

See also:

For real-time films, I can't go past Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) and for superb Danish cinema, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt (2012). Both excellent films.

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