Movie buffs may recognize the name Gustav Möller because his debut feature, “The Guilty,” played Sundance, then went on to inspire an English-language remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal. The film famously took place on one end of an emergency services line, as an overcommitted police officer tried to rescue a distressed caller whose crisis wasn’t nearly as straightforward as it sounded. An impressive example of creativity within constraints, “The Guilty” invited audiences to make an action movie in their heads while giving them little more than the tense face of a single character to look at for most of its running time.
With “Sons,” Möller has made a more conventional film, but still does most of his storytelling off-screen. His protagonist is a Danish corrections officer named Eva Hansen. She’s half the size of most of the male prisoners on her ward, but can obviously hold her own, swelling...
With “Sons,” Möller has made a more conventional film, but still does most of his storytelling off-screen. His protagonist is a Danish corrections officer named Eva Hansen. She’s half the size of most of the male prisoners on her ward, but can obviously hold her own, swelling...
- 2/22/2024
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Doubling down on his breakout success, “The Guilty” writer-director Gustav Möller returns with another claustrophobic — almost single-location — thriller about a morally compromised member of law enforcement whose personal failings reflect the structural flaws of the system that upholds their power. I guess you can’t have too many of those. “Sons,” at least, is a richer and more probing thing than Möller’s debut, even if the pointed questions that it forces out of its hyper-contained premise ultimately make this steely two-hander feel more like a sociopolitical thought exercise than a living portrait of punishment and salvation.
Where “The Guilty” was confined to an emergency call center, “Sons” takes place almost entirely within the walls of a maximum-security jail on the outskirts of Copenhagen. A prison guard played by the great Sidse Babett Knudsen, Eva is of course free to come and go as she pleases, but the film’s...
Where “The Guilty” was confined to an emergency call center, “Sons” takes place almost entirely within the walls of a maximum-security jail on the outskirts of Copenhagen. A prison guard played by the great Sidse Babett Knudsen, Eva is of course free to come and go as she pleases, but the film’s...
- 2/22/2024
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Cinematographer Jasper Spanning’s debut feature, Den skyldige / The Guilty, won several awards during its international run. Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller, the movie followed one character, primarily on a single set, as he deals with a mounting crisis. Spanning spoke about it in a Filmmaker interview with Chris Doyle. He followed it with the May el-Toukhy’s controversial drama Queen of Hearts, about a charged relationship between a wife and her stepson. It was a World Cinema audience award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Director of Programming Kim Yutani called it the most provocative film she had […]...
- 4/29/2020
- by Daniel Eagan
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Cinematographer Jasper Spanning’s debut feature, Den skyldige / The Guilty, won several awards during its international run. Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller, the movie followed one character, primarily on a single set, as he deals with a mounting crisis. Spanning spoke about it in a Filmmaker interview with Chris Doyle. He followed it with the May el-Toukhy’s controversial drama Queen of Hearts, about a charged relationship between a wife and her stepson. It was a World Cinema audience award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Director of Programming Kim Yutani called it the most provocative film she had […]...
- 4/29/2020
- by Daniel Eagan
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
In TV, it’s called a “bottle episode”: a half-hour or hour of an ongoing series that corrals a cast into a single, usually closed-off location and forces the show’s creatives/creators to work within those parameters. The Guilty, Swedish filmmaker Gustav Möller’s feature debut, sticks to a somewhat similar limited set-up. A man (Jakob Cedergren) sits in a room, behind a desk, answering a phone. His name is Asger. He didn’t always do this; once upon a time, he was a cop who worked a beat,...
- 10/18/2018
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
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