We’ve been pretty skeptical of “quar cinema,” where, earlier in the pandemic and unable to be consumed by fear and in a catatonic panic like the rest of us, Hollywood types decided to make movies, god damn it, no matter whether or not they were any good. It’s a sort of first-thought-best-thought cinema which sounds cool in theory and has proven to be utterly dreadful in practice (cough How It Ends cough), but a few decent ideas have emerged from that period. One of those rarified few was Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty, a remake of a solid Danish thriller that got some praise when it landed on these shores a few years ago. It’s a near-perfect set-up: It all takes place in a single location, with a single physical actor in the room — in this case, Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a 911 operator — and a pretty fun concept. Netflix dropped a trailer for it earlier on Tuesday, and, hell, it looks pretty solid.
Peep it:
Here’s a synopsis, though you can always just do your due diligence and watch the original film — it’s currently streaming on Hulu — or you can watch that one movie with Halle Berry that sounds a lot like this one when you first read about it but turns out to be a whole lot dumber in practice than this is:
“The film takes place over the course of a single morning in a 911 dispatch call center. Call operator Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) tries to save a caller in grave danger — but he soon discovers that nothing is as it seems, and facing the truth is the only way out.“
The Guilty will have its world premiere later this week at this year’s TIFF, and you can bet we’ll have a review up for it at some point during our festival coverage. But you won’t have to wait too long to see it yourself, as it’ll hit theaters on September 24 before it becomes available on Netflix streaming on October 1.