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 selected as 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.

The film 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 the project was developed through the school's screenwriting programme with co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen. The film is shot almost entirely in a single Copenhagen 112 emergency dispatch room across approximately twelve actual hours of continuous shooting; the lead, Jakob Cedergren, appears in essentially every frame.

The film was acquired for an English-language remake by Antoine Fuqua and Jake Gyllenhaal almost immediately after its Sundance premiere; the Fuqua-directed Netflix version starring Gyllenhaal was released in 2021 and effectively retired the original from American streaming visibility. Möller's follow-up was the 2024 thriller Sons with Sidse Babett Knudsen, which premiered at the Berlinale; The Guilty remains the work that established him as the most internationally exported new Danish writer-director of his generation.