Gyllenhaal goes deep here-it will be too broad for some in the final scenes-but I was reminded how invested he is every single time. Of course, anyone who places that much personal baggage on one case is going to make crucial mistakes. He will be a good cop, a good father, and a good man. There’s a sense that if he can save Emily that everything will finally be better. He conveys the tenor of a broken man from the very beginning, finding an emotional undercurrent of salvation in Joe that wasn’t fully explored in the original. And Gyllenhaal completely commits, filling almost every frame of the 90-minute film. Of course, most of all, this is a taut genre exercise that Hitch would have loved-it has a similar forced perspective to “ Rear Window” if you think about it. Still, the fact is that Joe is going to appear in court the next day for mistakes he made on the job, and there’s a throughline of what happens to him on this very long night that reflects how often cops act urgently and incorrectly, allowing emotion to overwhelm reason. Fuqua and Pizzolatto carefully tie Joe's behavior into errors in police work without ever making the film into a commentary on Defunding the Police. He acts on his interpretations and makes some drastic mistakes. He vows to save Emily and her daughter without really having any clear understanding of what’s going on. He figures out she’s in a very bad situation, and he soon gets incredibly invested in her nightmare, even more so after he speaks to Emily’s six-year-old daughter, who is home alone and terrified.
THE GUILTY NETFLIX SERIES
She’s in trouble but can’t exactly say why, so Joe leads her through a series of yes and no questions. The breakneck pace of this thriller picks up when Joe gets a call from a terrified woman named Emily ( Riley Keough, giving an absolutely phenomenal voice performance). All of this oppressive tension leads him to quickly judge the people who call him, like when he scolds a caller for taking drugs or argues with another who has been robbed by a prostitute on Bunker Hill. Finally, he’s dealing with a separation from his family, trying to call his daughter just to say goodnight. He’s also wrestling with an undefined controversy that demoted this LAPD officer into a dispatcher and has led to calls from reporters.
He’s an asthmatic who has been forced to use his inhaler even more in this era of smoke and flame. We meet Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) on the night shift in a 911 dispatch center as his city of Los Angeles burns on massive screens in the background. The skeleton of this thriller is pretty much identical, all the way down to the clever little prologue that sets up our protagonist as flawed while also adding a different backdrop that’s very California. She says that her little brother Oliver is sleeping in the room, and she is terrified as her mother has left her alone.Ultimately, the narrative of Antoine Fuqua’s “The Guilty” operates largely from the motto of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And yet, to be fair, screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto (“True Detective”) does add a few different notes of commentary on American policing and ignorant masculinity that slightly distinguish his take thematically, and Jake Gyllenhaal delivers as one would expect, proving again that he’s one of the most consistent actors alive. He then gets on a call with Abby, Emily’s six-year-old daughter.
He immediately informs the patrolling officers about whatever information he has. Clutching a blue inhaler so hard his veins stand out, yelling at his colleagues and fellow dispatchers when things dont go his way, Gyllenhaal paints a portrait of. Joe concludes that a woman named Emily has been kidnapped by her ex-husband/partner and her two children are alone at home and in grave danger. He formulates his conjectures based upon the fragmentary conversation with Emily.
Joe senses the fragility and precariousness of Emily’s situation and therefore starts asking her yes and no questions. Emily pretends to talk to her daughter, while in reality, she is making a 911 call. Joe has to fill in the blanks at a lot of places. The disclosure of the information is ambiguous in nature. Emily blurs out facts about her whereabouts and the danger that she is stuck in. He often judges the inconsequential nature of problems these people have until a caller named Emily gives him a call. Though he attends these calls, we often see him losing his temper and patience on the callers. He tries to mend those broken pieces, but it becomes as difficult as bringing two like-poles of a magnet together.Ī police officer, Joe, is on duty for attending 911 distress calls.
The film takes you on a journey where you see a protagonist burdened by guilt, and everything he touches just breaks into fragments.