Jake Gyllenhaal in his latest film “The Guilty” is about to hang up on a woman who he thinks has inappropriately called 911 when he realizes she may have been abducted and is unable to speak freely. From there he gets caught up in a tense, real-time effort to try and bring this woman help.
In “The Guilty,” Gyllenhaal plays a call operator in a 911 dispatch call center, and the film itself takes place over a single morning and even mainly within a single room where Gyllenhaal’s character does everything in his power to bring the woman to safety. But he soon discovers that nothing on this call is as it seems, and facing the truth is the only way out.
Netflix went all out with their promotion of the film, which figures to be an awards contender and is playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. The streamer turned to Gyllenhaal’s social media last week and even to the skies in Los Angeles and Orange County, displaying a mysterious phone number that, when you called it, you heard the first heart-stopping phone call that Gyllenhaal’s character receives in the film.
“The Guilty” is actually based on a 2018 Danish film of the same name by director Gustav Möller. The film was highly critically acclaimed and virtually swept the Danish equivalent of the Oscars, picking up seven “Roberts,” and it also made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the Audience Award.
Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day”) is directing “The Guilty,” and Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) wrote the screenplay. Also starring alongside Gyllenhaal is an impressive cast that includes Peter Sarsgaard, Riley Keough, Bill Burr, Byron Bowers, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, David Castañeda, Christina Vidal, Paul Dano, Ethan Hawke, Adrian Martinez, Beau Knapp and Edi Patterson.
Check out the first teaser trailer for “The Guilty” here and above.