While there are plenty of single location movies, the great ones make you forget that you’re just in one place. Gustav Möller‘s “The Guilty,” which makes its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, aims to keep you on the edge of your seat, and make you forget that its ingenious concept involves nothing more than a dispatcher trying to solve a twisty mystery.
Starring Jakob Cedergren, Jessica Dinnage, Johan Olsen, and Omar Shargawi, the film follows police officer Asger Holm, who is demoted to desk work, and expects a sleepy beat as an emergency dispatcher. That all changes when he answers a panicked phone call from a kidnapped woman who then disconnects abruptly. Asger, confined to the police station, is forced to use others as his eyes and ears as the severity of the crime slowly becomes more clear. The search to find the missing woman and her assailant will take every bit of his intuition and skill, as a ticking clock and his own personal demons conspire against him.
“I believe that the strongest images in film, the ones that stay with you the longest; they are the ones, you don’t see,” Möller says about his film. “I got the idea for the film when I stumbled across a real life 911 call from a kidnapped woman. The woman was traveling by car, and since she was sitting next to her kidnapper she was speaking in codes. At first I was just gripped by the suspense of the call, as any listener would. But then I started reflecting on what made it so intriguing. Even though I had just listened to a sound recording it felt like I had seen images. I had seen the woman, the car she was in, the road the car was on, and even the kidnapper sitting next to her. I realized, that every single person listening to that phone call would see different images: a different woman, a different kidnapper, and so on. I started thinking: What if you used this idea of mental imagery in a film?”
“My vision with making ‘The Guilty’ has been to make a suspenseful and character-driven thriller, but more than that to make a film that gives every single audience member a completely unique experience,“ he added.
Below, you can get a taste of the film’s unique tension in our exclusive clip from the thriller. Additionally, we’re debuting the poster, which also aims to capture the tense atmosphere of “The Guilty.”
“We wanted capture the concept and the genre of the film in the poster. We wanted to stay tru to the film and be honest to the audience – they are going to watch a nail biting thriller close together with our main character played by Jakob Cedergren,” said producer Lina Flint.
“The Guilty” premieres today at the Sundance Film Festival.
