The Guilty (Den Skyldige): Movie Review

This had completely passed me by until my son and I took a chance on it on Netflix last night.  We didn’t choose with great conviction. (Subtitled, slow looking and only really one character – could it possibly hold our attention?)

The movie consists of essentially one character on screen, a disgraced police officer, who is serving a ‘punishment’ as a telephone dispatcher/call operator in a Copenhagen police call centre.  However many characters are brought in through multiple phone calls to drive the narrative at breathtaking speed and in real time.

Virtually the entire movie takes place in two rooms in real time as he deals with a call from a woman who has been kidnapped by her husband.  It becomes something of a whodunnit as the initial call, and the reasons behind her kidnapping, are expertly sleuthed by our hero, Jakob Cedergren, in a commanding performance that is expertly directed and written by Gustav Möller and filmed by Jasper Spanning.  Bravo to both.

Nordic Noir you could call it, but it is an electrifyingly claustrophobic and intense tunner of a story that you cannot possibly predict each twist and turn. It turns out it was Denmark’s official foreign language Oscar entry and it’s plain to see why.

Magnificent and highly recommended.

Dear Mr Trump, I just want to bring a point of order to your attention. You might want to think about it next time you try to send folk back to ‘where they came from’.

Earlier this week a man, unfit for office in my opinion, created the most odious racist slur I can recall in my lifetime from a person with that much influence.  Maybe we have to go back to 1930’s Germany for a comparator, maybe historians can inform me of more recent misdemeanours.

It’s been buzzing around in my brain ever since because its feels not only odious but also ill-informed.

The penny dropped earlier when I thought, if anyone has ANY right to make such a statement, acceptable or otherwise, it surely must be the people that have the only claim to being ‘from here’; Native Americans.

In 1492, before they were massacred by people from ‘over there’, there were 112m Native Americans.

Today there are 5.4 m in a US population of 325m; roughly 2%.

The American Dream; the thing that ‘Makes America Great’ most Americans would, I contend, agree is built around the notion of the ‘land of opportunity’ where anyone, from anywhere, can, if they apply themselves, make a great life – even if they arrive poverty stricken.  (Anyone who has visited Ellis Island Museum, as I have, will see this brought into sharp relief.)

Trump may have been born in America, as three of his four slandered Democratic women – note they were all women – also were but Trump is only second generation American as we Scots know.

And his wife is not ‘from there’.

My point is that virtually no-one in the USA has a right to tell ANYONE in the USA to ‘go back to where they came from’ because virtually everyone in the USA technically came from somewhere else.

To make this sort of vile statement by the man who is custodian of the American constitution is reprehensible beyond belief.

The man is unfit for office.

He is unfit for inviting round to your house for dinner even.

I sincerely hope this makes the left wing of the Republican vote seriously consider whether they want to re-elect a man who has disrespected his country, his party, his wife, his Scottish Grandmother and, ultimately, himself.