Antoine Fuqua’s 2021 remake of the Danish film Den skyldige keeps Jake Gyllenhaal at a 911 console for 90 minutes while every other character reaches him by phone. It was shot in eleven days in pandemic-era Los Angeles, with its director watching from a van parked outside, and it became one of Netflix’s most-watched films of that autumn.

The Guilty takes place over a single night in Los Angeles, with wildfires burning across the region. Joe Baylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an LAPD officer who has been taken off the street and put on the night shift at a 911 call centre while he waits for a court hearing over an incident on duty eight months earlier. Most of the calls he takes are routine. Then he answers one from Emily Lighton (Riley Keough), a woman who tells him she has been abducted and is in a white van on a highway. She has to hang up before she can say much more, and the California Highway Patrol tells Joe it cannot find a van without a licence plate.

From there the film never leaves the call centre. Joe works the case with the tools of his desk: Emily’s home number, where her six-year-old daughter Abby picks up; the phone of Emily’s husband, Henry Fisher (Peter Sarsgaard); his supervisor, Sergeant Bill Miller (Ethan Hawke), who will not send officers anywhere without a warrant; and his former partner, Rick (Eli Goree), who is off duty and worried about what Joe intends to say at the hearing. Each call changes what Joe thinks is happening in the van, and the film’s final turns are best left for the viewing. What can be said is that the title refers to more than one person.

A Danish film, a dispatcher and a phone

The Guilty is a close remake of Den skyldige, the 2018 Danish thriller that marked the feature debut of Gustav Möller, who wrote it with Emil Nygaard Albertsen. In the original, Jakob Cedergren plays Asger Holm, a Copenhagen police officer assigned to the emergency desk while he awaits a hearing over a fatal on-duty shooting, and the calls come in on Denmark’s 112 line. The film was made for around €500,000, runs 85 minutes and premiered in January 2018 in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival, where Magnolia Pictures acquired the US rights.

Den skyldige went on to be Denmark’s submission for the Best International Feature Film award at the 91st Academy Awards and made the December shortlist, and it was the big winner at Denmark’s Robert Awards. That record made it an obvious candidate for an English-language version, and the remake keeps the original’s architecture almost intact: a demoted officer, a hearing hanging over him, an abducted woman, a white van, a frightened child on a home phone and a partner asked to break into an apartment. What changes is the map. Copenhagen and North Zealand become Los Angeles and the California Highway Patrol, 112 becomes 911, and the night is set against a fire season rather than an ordinary shift.

A director, a writer and a Southpaw reunion

The remake started with its star. In December 2018 Jake Gyllenhaal acquired the rights to Den skyldige and set it up as a vehicle he would lead and produce through his company, Nine Stories Productions, with Bold Films. In September 2020 Antoine Fuqua came on board as director and producer. The two had already worked together on Southpaw (2015), the boxing drama in which Gyllenhaal replaced the originally announced lead, so The Guilty was a reunion for both.

Fuqua arrived with a long record in police and crime stories. His breakthrough, Training Day (2001), won Denzel Washington the Academy Award for Best Actor, and he later directed the three Equalizer films (2014–2023), also with Washington. After The Guilty he made Emancipation (2022) and the Michael Jackson biopic Michael (2026), which has become the highest-grossing film of his career. Seen from that filmography, The Guilty is an outlier: a small, contained production from a director better known for scale and gunfire.

The screenplay is by Nic Pizzolatto, the novelist (Galveston, 2010) who created the HBO series True Detective. Pizzolatto had already worked with Fuqua, co-writing The Magnificent Seven (2016) with Richard Wenk. When the project was announced, Gyllenhaal was also reported to have made uncredited revisions to the script. Later that same month Netflix bought the worldwide rights to the film for $30 million, before a frame had been shot.

Eleven days in November, directed from a van

Principal photography took place in Los Angeles in November 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and lasted eleven days. Three days before the shoot was due to begin, a person who had been in contact with Fuqua tested positive for the virus. Fuqua tested negative and the schedule held, but under the production’s safety rules he directed the entire film from a van, known as Colorspace, parked near the set and fitted with screens that showed the camera feeds. He stayed in touch with the cast and crew from there, and both he and Gyllenhaal have said they never stood face to face during the shoot.

The cast was announced that same month, and much of it never appears on camera. On screen, Jake Gyllenhaal shares the call centre with Christina Vidal Mitchell as Sergeant Denise Wade and Adrian Martinez as a fellow dispatcher, Manny. The rest of the ensemble is credited as voices: Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard and Eli Goree, plus Paul Dano as a caller named Matthew Fontenot, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as a Highway Patrol dispatcher and the comedian Bill Burr as a caller from a nightclub. For a film built on the telephone, it is an unusually well-known cast for parts that are only heard.

Behind the camera, Fuqua worked with the cinematographer Maz Makhani, the editor Jason Ballantine and the composer Marcelo Zarvos. The finished film runs 90 minutes, five more than the Danish original, which leaves the remake almost as compact as the film it is based on.

Toronto, Netflix and 69 million households

The Guilty had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2021. It opened in a limited number of US cinemas on 24 September and arrived on Netflix worldwide on 1 October 2021. Within its first month, Netflix reported that the film had been watched by 69 million households and had been the most-watched film on the service in 91 countries, figures based on the company’s metric at the time, which counted any account that watched at least two minutes.

Comparisons with Den skyldige followed the remake from its first screenings, which is the usual fate of a quick English-language version of a recent and well-travelled European film. The two share a premise, a structure and most of their turns, so the conversation tended to settle on what the American film adds: a bigger city, a wildfire backdrop, a larger cast of voices and a star whose company owned the project. Most of the attention went to Jake Gyllenhaal, who carries the film almost alone on screen.

A premise that keeps travelling

The story has not stopped at two films. In 2026 a stage version of The Guilty opened at the Donmar Warehouse in London, adapted by the playwright Chloë Moss from the original screenplay by Gustav Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen, with Russell Tovey in the lead. A narrative built around one room and a set of disembodied voices turned out to fit a small theatre about as naturally as it fitted a low-budget Danish production.

The format itself has a long lineage. Single-location thrillers built around a phone line include Phone Booth (2002), with Colin Farrell trapped in a street call box, The Call (2013), with Halle Berry as a 911 operator, and Locke (2013), in which Tom Hardy spends the whole film driving and making calls. The Guilty belongs to that family, though its emergency-room setting and the hearing hanging over Joe Baylor come straight from the Danish film.

Five years after its Netflix release, The Guilty is best understood as a well-resourced test of a sturdy idea: what happens when a Hollywood director, a star producer and a writer known for long-form crime television take a Danish film about a man at a switchboard and move it to Los Angeles on an emergency schedule. Viewers who know Den skyldige will mostly be watching for the differences; those who do not will find a 90-minute thriller that rests almost entirely on Jake Gyllenhaal and a telephone.