Why The New Jake Gyllenhaal Movie 'The Guilty' Doesn’t Work

This triggers not only the character’s repressed sadness and blatant anger issues but also his personal entanglement around (and mental unraveling with) the case. So he’s the guilty, you see. It’s a perfectly fine twist, to be sure, although wait ’til you hear of the one at the end of Spoiler Territory 2: Spoiler Alert.

In the movie’s defense, this information is delivered with a bit more depth, and it is also one of the main twists of the original Danish version. But the problem is that Denmark has a quite different history of police brutality when compared to the US, and so the original protagonist’s tortured pain at his own unjustified killing of a young man in the American version becomes the white-washing, redeeming focus of the suffering victimizer—and this at the expense of any true reflection on institutional violence or on what it creates in its enforcers, not to even mention focus on the victims.

The tone-deafness of doing an American remake of such an intimate-yet-debate-opening story, then, lies in that the emotional gut-punch of the concept’s third act becomes lost – or rather, in that it becomes a physical gut-punch, you know, in front of your children, then justified by an entire ideology of law and order refusing to even acknowledge its complicity with the structural violence that police forces, uh, enforce.

Hence, The Guilty: The Sad Story of a Little Police Man Who’s So So Sad You Guys but He’s Trying indeed takes a concept that invites complex, nuanced, critical discussions on the mental toll of enforcing state violence and turns it into, well, copaganda. Classy copaganda, of course, it’s Jake Gyllenhaal. But copaganda nonetheless. For even if Denmark’s own record of police behavior is obviously not perfect, a story humanizing a cop for murdering someone not in self-defense, just for mysterious psychological reasons he himself can’t understand, and then swapping the obvious reference to systemic, structural causes into a redeeming hero-arc about personal responsibility? Yeah, I don’t know, sounds like pure ideology.

Context matters is what we’re trying to say, and this also applies to the context and message of your quasi-artsy remake. In the end, and considering the ongoing unmasking of police brutality, cop ideology, and the economic interests that sustain the need for them, it just feels super tacky.

Like doing a movie on the institutional and psychological dimensions of police brutality… and then pushing the real issues under the rug because cops should just be able to get in touch with their feelings, you know.

Top Image: Netflix