Peter Sarsgard – Podcasting Them Softly

Single location thrillers seem to be the rage these days, intermittently anyways. Ryan Reynolds buried alive, Stephen Dorff locked in the trunk of a car, Tom Hardy in a vehicle winding its way through the UK to London, and now we have a severely stressed out Jake Gyllenhaal as a 911 operator in Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty, an absolutely stunning film and the best of the bunch so far in this sub-genre. Jake is a decorated LAPD detective, now disgraced after a vague incident we gradually learn more about, stuck in an emergency call centre, apparently the proverbial doghouse for demoted cops. A routine evening turns disastrous when he receives a frantic call from a young woman (Riley Keogh) who has been kidnapped by her unstable ex boyfriend (Peter Sarsgard) and is somewhere out there. Using the resources he has he tries to track them down before inevitable violence ensues while processing the emotional turmoil of his own recent past, and how this terrifying new situation affects it, all set against the chaos of a hellish wildfire setting the LA hills ablaze and turning first responder services upside down. For a film where most of the actors are offscreen we sure get some big talent in here including Ethan Hawke, Christina Vidal, Paul Dano and even a brief Bill Burr. The film relies on Gyllenhaal’s performance to get the story and themes across and the man is just fucking sensational here in what may be his best performance to date. There’s an unearthly anguish, frantic mania and deep unrest to his portrayal (the title makes tragic sense as the film progresses) and he hits every note with intimidating precision and organic emotional truth. Keogh and Saarsgard have difficult tasks in creating two secondary characters who we never see but must feel, sound and affect us as real human beings and not just voices from a telephone, they both do unbelievably well, mining psychological depths and putting forth heartbreaking, haunting vocal performances. Antoine Fuqua is responsible for some of my favourite films of all time (Training Day, King Arthur, The Replacement Killers) and I’m glad he broke free of his tired Equalizer routine to bring us this. Working with an intense, visceral script from True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto, he turns what could have been a gimmicky procedural into a showstopper of a thriller full of kinetic, anxiety fuelling energy, challenging moral themes and career best performances from Gyllenhaal, Sarsgard and Keogh. One of the best films of the year.

-Nate Hill

I’d be surprised if another film came out this year that was worse than The Lie. It would take a serious, solid gold turkey to dethrone this thing. I want nothing more than to fill your timeline with positive reviews of films I enjoyed and I don’t try to focus on the negative but sometimes one comes along that just needs to be publicly shamed, if only to set an example. This is a truly awful, misguided, bizarre, tone deaf, incomprehensible excuse for a thriller and I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart that wonderful actors like Mireille Einos, Peter Sarsgaard and young Joey King (she was awesome in The Conjuring) and nice wintry Ontario locations got swept up into this thing’s toxic orbit. A young girl (King) and her father (Sarsgaard) are driving a long stretch of snowy road one day, when they stop off to pick up the girl’s friend. The two argue, the car stops, they run off into the woods to argue some more, and the girl pushes her friend off a high bridge into icy waters below, killing her. What to do? Well not what these people come up with as a plan, for starters. Dad and the girl’s lawyer mom (Mireille Einos) decide to cover up their daughter’s crime, lie to investigators, evade the poor father of the dead girl (Cas Anvar) and generally make the situation as shitty as they can for themselves, their kid and everyone putting in paid hours and stressing out trying to find this missing girl. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck is wrong with these mentally deficient people? How, in any scenario on any planet, when the mom is a goddamn *lawyer*, is it in any way intuitively constructive to play their odds on trying to cover this up? I wanted to grab every character in this film, the daughter included, and roughly shake them by the shoulders whilst screaming at them to seriously just grow up. Don’t even get me started on the certifiably nuts twist ending that just adds an extra layer of asininity to a narrative with already zero credibility, integrity or realism. I realize that people make dumb mistakes, no one is perfect and situations can get out of hand real quick, but none of that excuses the mockery of human behaviour on display here, it’s like this script was written by.. I dunno man, not a human being with any sense of how people act or function. Avoid at all costs.

-Nate Hill