JAKE GYLLENHAAL CARRIES CLAUSTROPHOBIC ‘THE GUILTY'

An emergency dispatch center doesn’t exactly sound like the most visually exciting place to set an entire film. But the technical limitation of being imprisoned in a soulless office while high stakes action takes place off-screen can be an inspired storytelling gimmick in the right hands, as it is in “ The Guilty,” directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Nic Pizzolatto and starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

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A remake of a 2018 Danish film by the same name, Fuqua’s “The Guilty” puts the audience in a Los Angeles 911 call center in the middle of the night as Gyllenhaal’s disgraced police officer Joe Baylor fields emergency calls from around the city.

Joe probably isn’t the calmest man in the world under normal circumstances but take into the fact that he’s doing one of the most stressful jobs in the world while also awaiting a major trial the next day and you can start to appreciate why he’s so extremely tense.

He’s a little distracted when we meet him as well. He’s a field guy relegated to office work, for one, and he’s getting calls that likely aren’t emergencies: A guy robbed by the sex worker he hired; Another having a bad episode on drugs. It’s worth hanging around for the credits to peek at all the famous names providing the voices on the other end of the line (Riley Keough, Paul Dano, Ethan Hawke, Bill Burr, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph are just a few of the people he speaks to over the course of the night).