The Guilty

Gustav Möller's The Guilty (Danish: Den Skyldige) won the World Cinema Audience Award in the Dramatic competition at Sundance 2018 and was Denmark's official submission for the 91st Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. It made the December 2018 shortlist of nine but did not advance to the final five.

It is Möller's debut feature, made for under one million euros at the Filmschool of the National Film School of Denmark. Möller had recently graduated, and he developed the project through the school's screenwriting programme with his co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen. Almost all of it takes place in a single Copenhagen 112 emergency dispatch room, shot across approximately twelve actual hours of continuous filming, and the lead, Jakob Cedergren, is in essentially every frame. The film rests on his face and on the voices at the other end of the line.

Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal acquired it for an English-language remake almost immediately after its Sundance premiere. The Fuqua-directed Netflix version starring Gyllenhaal came out in 2021 and effectively removed the original from American streaming view. Möller's follow-up was the 2024 thriller Sons with Sidse Babett Knudsen, which premiered at the Berlinale, but The Guilty is still the film that made him the most internationally exported new Danish writer-director of his generation.