The Guilty

Asger Holm is a police officer in Denmark who has been reassigned from street duty to answering emergency calls at a dispatch centre. During what seems a routine shift, he takes a call from a frightened woman who says she has been abducted. The line goes dead, and from that point Asger is confined to his desk, with the telephone as his only means of acting. As he works to trace the woman and whoever is holding her, passing minutes make a good outcome less likely, and he comes to suspect the case is not a straightforward kidnapping. The story unfolds almost entirely through what Asger hears and says, revealing his own difficulties alongside the crime he is trying to stop.

The film is the first feature directed by Gustav Möller, who wrote the screenplay with Emil Nygaard Albertsen; Lina Flint produced it for Nordisk Film Denmark. Jakob Cedergren plays Asger on screen, while the other main performers, among them Jessica Dinnage, Omar Shargawi, Johan Olsen, Jacob Lohmann and Katinka Evers-Jahnsen, are heard as voices on the phone. Möller's second feature, Sons, followed in 2024. Released in 2018 and running eighty-five minutes, the Danish production drew a critics' rating of 8 out of 10 from 123 reviews, while audiences on TMDB rate it 7.3 out of 10 from 1,894 votes, a narrower gap between the two than is common.