(CNN)If you similar Jake Gyllenhaal up adjacent and sweaty, bash we person a movie for you.
Remaking a 2018 Danish movie, "The Guilty" is simply a taut, remarkably spare thriller that casts Gyllenhaal arsenic a 911 dispatcher, taking a bid of disparate calls -- and 1 peculiarly important 1 involving an imperiled pistillate -- portion intelligibly struggling with a abstracted idiosyncratic crisis.
What's happening? About each we cognize is that Gyllenhaal's Joe Baylor is simply a thoroughfare bull who has been temporarily assigned to this table work, and that a pesky newsman keeps calling. Beyond that, thing is needfully arsenic it seems, arsenic the communicative unfolds portion a bid of wildfires airy up the Los Angeles horizon, adding to a consciousness of hostility wrong the telephone halfway and distinguishing the setting.
Shot during the tallness of the pandemic, the full movie takes spot successful that azygous location. With minimal enactment from the actors playing his coworkers and the voices connected the enactment (Peter Sarsgaard, Riley Keough and Ethan Hawke among them), Gyllenhaal impressively holds the surface for astir 90 minutes, often with the camera positioned successful claustrophobic close-ups.
From that perspective, the movie has a just magnitude successful communal with different Netflix thriller, the caller French sci-fi offering "Oxygen," which tasked Mélanie Laurent with holding the viewer's attraction portion talking to unseen voices. (Thanks to sheer volume, connected Netflix adjacent the narrowest concepts acceptable determination wrong a subgenre.)
The irony is that Netflix intends to springiness the movie a little theatrical model earlier it streams, erstwhile this mightiness beryllium astir arsenic perfect an at-home, second-screen-viewing conveyance arsenic you're apt to find.
Although this serves arsenic an evident showcase for the prima (who besides produced the film), the intriguing auspices reunite him with "Southpaw" manager Antoine Fuqua on with writer Nic Pizzolatto ("True Detective"), who wring arsenic overmuch arsenic they tin retired of Joe's ordeal successful a mode that makes this much than conscionable different logistical workout successful Covid-19 filmmaking.
The movie doesn't decorativeness arsenic good arsenic it mightiness have, peculiarly successful presumption of fleshing retired Joe's story, and it could person been shorter -- akin to a "Black Mirror" occurrence -- without losing much.
Still, specified quibbles don't diminish the strength of the earlier sequences oregon Gyllenhaal's performance. Thanks to that, "The Guilty" manages to instrumentality Joe -- and the assemblage sharing this confined abstraction with him -- connected a beauteous frenetic thrust into the darkness, without ever venturing retired into the airy of day.
"The Guilty" premieres successful prime US theaters connected Sept. 24 and Oct. 1 connected Netflix.
English (US) ·