The Guilty
“The Guilty reinforces the false belief that people with mental health conditions are ‘dangerous to society.’”
Title: The Guilty (2021)
Director: Antoine Fuqua 👨🏾🇺🇸
Writer: Nic Pizolatto 👨🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Alicja Johnson 👩🏼🇺🇸
—MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD—
Technical: 3/5
In Netflix’s new film The Guilty, we meet Los Angeles Police Department Officer Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllehaal) during a late night shift at a 911 call center. Though he finds the dispatch job beneath him, Joe has been assigned there while being investigated for killing a 19-year-old on the job. Amid a wildfire-driven barrage of calls, Joe hears from a kidnapped woman named Emily (Riley Keough), apparently dialling in from her assailant’s vehicle. And so ignites Joe’s hero complex, as he becomes overly invested in helping the caller—even if it means breaking the rules (and being an asshole while doing it).
Adapted from a 2018 Danish film of the same name, The Guilty takes place entirely in the call center, ensuring that viewers are as isolated from the action as Joe is. Gyllenhaal’s performance conveys the deep frustration and helplessness that the LAPD officer feels as he struggles to save the woman from afar. Yet at times, Gyllenhaal’s melodramatic displays are so over-the-top that the sudden lack of realism pulls us out of the film.
The story itself remains largely true to the source material, which is full of unexpected twists and turns. Though we never see any violence, The Guilty plays with our preconceived notions and natural assumptions to shock us in ways that are more impactful than simple gore. It’s true what they say: Sometimes the biggest thrill comes from what you don’t see.
Gender: 1/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE
While The Guilty has female characters, they arrive as disembodied voices. It’s true that the lack of corporeal women in this story has more to do with the single-location setting than any purposeful exclusion, but the few we do hear don’t contribute much. There’s Emily, whose phone call kicks off this whole saga, but she exists as a damsel in distress for the entirety of the film. And Da’Vine Joy Randall voices a character known only as “California Highway Patrol dispatcher” who serves as an obstacle to Joe’s unsanctioned detective work. After unjustly enduring Joe’s ire (read: the most unprofessional yelling you can imagine), CHP dispatcher returns at the end of the film to inform Joe that he’s saved the day, ending her appearance on a “good job” to the man who’s spent the evening shouting at her.
It would be easier to forgive The Guilty’s lack of gender representation within the frame if the creators had sought balanced gender representation behind the camera. But no such luck. Key positions like director, writer, cinematographer, and editor are all occupied by men, while only 5 of the 20 producers credited on IMDb are women.
Race: 1.5/5
Although Black director Antoine Fuqua helms The Guilty, the fact that Gyllenhaal occupies nearly every frame of the film leaves little screen time for other faces. But even the secondary characters, who we only meet as voices on the other end of Joe’s phone calls, lack racial diversity.
Welp, it’s time for the “copaganda” talk. To put the production timeline in context: The Guilty began its 11-day shoot in October 2020, several months after the murder of George Floyd. For Hollywood’s part, many have called on creators to cease the steady flow of copaganda, or films and TV shows that depict cops as heroes to promote the false narrative that police violence comes from a few “bad apples” rather than the larger system. When asked about the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on producing The Guilty, Gyllenhaal noted that he and Fuqua discussed whether the project should proceed and decided it had become “more important” to make this movie.
So does The Guilty qualify as copaganda? Despite its best efforts, yes. The film doesn’t directly glorify Joe, an improvement over Fuqua’s previous police-centric films like Training Day (2001). However we’re seeing everything through Joe’s eyes, and though the film ends with Joe pleading guilty to manslaughter (because in The Guilty’s universe, the “system” can successfully root out a “bad apple” like Joe), he’s still the hero in this story. He saves the day by breaking protocol, which harmfully suggests that it’s okay when cops shirk the law—as long as they’re doing it to help someone. The bleak reality is that police going off-the-book frequently leads to deadly outcomes for people of color.
In a clear change from the original Danish film, screenwriter Nic Pizolatto added an undercurrent of distrust in law enforcement, which we see when Joe tries to frame himself as a “helper” when speaking with Emily’s daughter Abby (Christiana Montoya) and later, her ex-husband Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). It’s notable that the movie makes an effort to show that police officers aren’t heroes to everyone, but it’s unclear why these characters are white when we know that it’s usually people of color who have reason to fear the police. Simply put, the casting choices seem like an attempt to remove race from the film’s ideas about policing altogether.
Deduction for Disability: -0.50
The creators behind The Guilty undoubtedly realize that mental health services in the United States leave much to be desired. We learn that Joe has struggled with some unspecified issues, through offhand references to a former therapist he didn’t get along with. But what those issues are, we don’t know. Adding to that, we eventually find that Emily has committed a violent crime because she’s been unable to afford the medication she takes to treat her own unnamed mental illness. Though these vague references to mental health seem well-intentioned, they end up coming across as explanations for why Joe and Emily make inexcusable choices. Movies and television have long reinforced the false belief that people with mental health conditions are “dangerous to society,” and The Guilty unfortunately adds to this pattern.
Mediaversity Grade: F 1.67/5
Hollywood has only just begun to reckon with the harm done by copaganda, and while The Guilty tries to address this legacy, the attempt feels hollow. Ultimately, painting an empathetic portrait of a police officer accused of manslaughter while pushing characters of color to the sidelines makes one question whether the filmmakers have learned anything from the last year and a half.
Like The Guilty? Try these other titles that critique the broken system of policing in the United States.
Spiral (2021)
Detroit (2017)
Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral (2019)