A polished Netflix adaptation of the 2018 Danish thriller with a single location about an abducted lady seeking assistance is quality entertainment work. Here is a tense single-location thriller directed by Antoine Fuqua based on Gustav Möller’s highly regarded Danish film Den Skyldige (The Guilty) but with a little more Hollywood glitz.
It is based on the time-honoured premise that a 911 emergency operator must take a nerve-wracking call from a female kidnap victim who is pretending to her captor that she is speaking to her infant daughter while speaking (The Call, a 2013 movie starring Halle Berry as the operator, featured a similar concept.)
Jake Gyllenhaal plays LAPD officer Joe Baylor, a troubled man with a broken marriage and worsening health. The media keeps calling him, and he appears to have gotten into major difficulty over an incident at work.
Joe has been demoted to what he views as the humiliatingly lowly position of the emergency operator with a headset phone, handling 911 calls from the general public, most of which are farcically trivial, while his case is being examined. Wildfires in California are also continuously generating an atmosphere of urgency.
Joe responds to a terrified woman’s call in tears. Even though he has his problems, his police skills shine through, as he quickly figures out what’s happening and how to solve it with a few clues.
The analogies to his own difficult family circumstances also make the agonised Joe believe that there may be hope for personal atonement and that he should make a last-ditch effort to control and resolve the entire matter over the phone. He starts being increasingly irrational and disrespectful, continuing to work after his shift is over and disregarding all the other 911 calls.
It’s a staged set-up, so Gyllenhaal needs to lose it more extravagantly with yelling, losing his temper, and confessional misery as the dramatic effect of the close-up on the officer’s sweaty face and the faraway voice on the other end of the line begins to wear off over time.
But as time passes, the situation and title identity seem more complex than Joe thought.
It’s a well-made and intriguing movie about a man in a secular confessional box who feels he must act like a priest. Gyllenhaal does some excellent close-up acting, which may be too much to compensate for the lack of normal dramatic action.
