Watching Jake Gyllenhaal’s The Guilty, it is not hard to believe that the dark thriller portrays actual events. Set against the backdrop of the California wildfires and with a subplot involving police brutality, The Guilty‘s story holds a certain sense of veracity. A remake of the 2018 Danish film Den Skyldige, one would need to trace the story back to its source to find the truth. Though the subplot of The Guilty‘s main character, Joe Baylor, involves an episode of police brutality not in the original Danish film, both focus on a call center operator involved with a kidnapping.

Den Skyldige, the Danish thriller that forms the basis for The Guilty‘s gripping crime storyline, is based on other real-life sources. Though the exact story isn’t true, Den Skyldige is inspired by true crime footage and podcasts. While The Guilty finds its inspiration from Den Skyldige, many aspects were tweaked to fit an entirely new narrative, shifting its focus to themes of police brutality, broken people, and guilt. While not based on any real-life figure, The Guilty draws parallels from real situations.

The Guilty Was Inspired By Real Crime Footage

The Director Based It On A 911 Emergency Call & The Podcast Serial

So, is The Guilty based on a true story? Director and co-writer of Den Skyldige, Gustav Möller, claims that the inspiration for his film came from listening to real crime footage. Before making the film, Möller was inspired by a real 911 emergency call and the true-crime podcast Serial. So, while the exact happenings of the plot and the characters are fictional, Den Skyldige and its remake, The Guilty, are based on real crime elements. In The Guilty, the plot twists follow Joe as he tracks a kidnapped woman, Emily (played by Riley Keough).

Trapped in a vehicle with her kidnapper, Emily works to communicate her situation and location to Joe while pretending to speak to her young daughter, Abby. This scenario was taken directly from a real, 20-minute 911 call that Möller listened to on YouTube, in which the caller spoke in code. Adding to this already thrilling element from the original film, The Guilty has the kidnapping occur during the very real California wildfires, further rooting the film in actual events.

In an interview (via Variety), director Antoine Fuqua (who directed The Guilty from a van) says the fires were a nod to Dante’s Inferno and the idea that Joe’s character is in a kind of purgatory during the film. Möller has also pointed toward a podcast, Serial, as inspiration for Den Skyldige. In an interview (via CNET), Möller says:

“What I felt listening to Serial was for every episode of that show my images of these people and locations will change, because I’ll get new information about the suspect and the victim.“

This is undoubtedly the case in The Guilty, a film set entirely in one location with phone calls as the primary source of information. With each phone call that Joe makes and receives from Emily, her husband Henry, and their daughter Abby, new information is revealed, and the characters change. This leads to the film’s huge reveal — a twist that certainly makes one thankful that The Guilty‘s ending is not actually true.

Was Joe Baylor A Real Person?

Everyone In The Movie Is Fictionalized

Despite the realism Jake Gyllenhaal brings to the role with his strong performance, The Guilty‘s Joe Baylor is not a real person or based on a real person. Even Den Skyldige doesn’t have a character that directly corresponds to Joe. Instead, all the characters in The Guilty, and its Danish original, are fictionalized, being only loosely based on the true crimes Möller found interesting from the podcast. While Joe Baylor isn’t real, his character in The Guilty still makes for a gripping and surprising story based on actual events.

Including a real person in Joe’s place would rob the movie of its ability to pick and choose different crimes from various interesting corners of the source material. By referring to true crime for its narrative, The Guilty owes the victims involved a level of dignity, and having Joe as a cipher for the audience allows viewers to react in his shoes without introducing inaccuracies or framing the movie too starkly as a reenactment.

Why Jake Gyllenhaal Chose To Play Joe Baylor

While the answer to “is The Guilty based on a true story?” is ‘not quite’, Jake Gyllenhaal had his own personal reasons for taking on the role of 911 operator Joe Baylor. Gyllenhaal has never shied away from playing complex roles that seem true to life. Gyllenhaal did reportedly see Den Skyldige at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and he walked away inspired from the entire experience. In an interview with W Magazine, Donnie Darko actor Jake Gyllenhaal admitted that he wanted to see the movie through an American lens, and apparently begged for the rights.

He liked that The Guilty opened up conversation between audience members and knew that a new spin on the film would work exceedingly well in the states. Gyllenhaal said, “After a long negotiation process, I decided to develop it into an American version. I just thought that it was really prescient in the way it talked about all of our systems, how they were broken.” Indeed, the broken systems portrayed in The Guilty are a H๏τ-ʙuттon topic in the States today, something that Gyllenhaal clearly wanted to capitalize on.

The Differences Between The Two Versions Of The Guilty

The American Version Skips Subtlety For A Bigger Production

The 2021 remake of The Guilty was very loyal to the Danish original. The two movies share a lot in common, with very similar scripts and even camerawork and directing styles almost mimicking the original film. However, the two differ in certain areas, which changes much of the feel of the stories. The Danish version is minimalist, keeping things close and тιԍнт, focusing solely on the officer on the call. However, the American remake has giant TV screens with the California fires playing out, sometimes taking the focus off Joe.

This change distracts from the one thing that matters: Joe’s story and history, which play a mᴀssive role in his finally saving the woman’s life. This then plays into another difference between the two stories—Joe himself. Jake Gyllenhaal is a fantastic actor, but he also has a huge personality, whereas Jakob Cedergren was much more subdued in the original. Jake’s version of Joe is very combustible and loses his temper a lot, which is not how the Joe in the Danish version played out. This might change the American audience’s expectations of thrillers.

There is one more significant change, and once again, this might be the idea that American audiences need things more clearly spelled out for them. At the end of the Danish version, it is clear what will happen to Joe after he saves the woman’s life and makes his revelation. It is also obvious in the American remake, but newsreaders reveal the consequences at the end of The Guilty, making the remake much less subtle than the original.