'The Guilty' dials up Jake Gyllenhaal as a 911 operator on a very bad day

Remaking a 2018 Danish movie, "The Guilty" is a taut, remarkably spare thriller that casts Gyllenhaal as a 911 dispatcher, taking a series of disparate calls -- and one particularly significant one involving an imperiled woman -- while clearly struggling with a separate personal crisis.

Remaking a 2018 Danish movie, "The Guilty" is a taut, remarkably spare thriller that casts Gyllenhaal as a 911 dispatcher, taking a series of disparate calls -- and one particularly significant one involving an imperiled woman -- while clearly struggling with a separate personal crisis.

What's happening? About all we know is that Gyllenhaal's Joe Baylor is a street cop who has been temporarily assigned to this desk work, and that a pesky reporter keeps calling. Beyond that, nothing is necessarily as it seems, as the story unfolds while a series of wildfires light up the Los Angeles horizon, adding to a sense of tension within the call center and distinguishing the setting.