The Guilty, Gustav Möller’s riveting directorial debut, is a single, pared-back scene of claustrophobic tension, held together by a magnetic central performance. Its setup, which sees an emergency services operator drawn into an unfolding crime via a phone call, would be conventional enough were it not for the fact that the film takes place entirely in a darkened room – or, strictly speaking, two adjacent darkened rooms – and thereby plants itself within a niche lineage of movies that go out of their way to confine themselves to a single location.
The obvious touchstone for Möller is the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth, in which Kiefer Sutherland, on the other end of the line, very much succeeds at starting a fight in one. But, on closer inspection, The Guilty is truer to its confines than that film – which did eventually abscond the setting of its title – and in its cramped portrayal of a man driven to the brink by events he can’t quite control owes more to Locke, the Tom-Hardy-in-a-car piece that turned an impending feat of off-screen concrete engineering into an event as momentous as any rain-soaked prison escape or battle for Middle-earth.
Given how Hollywood’s finest directors are often lauded as “world-builders”, it’s worth noting how much inventiveness goes into the films that eschew the outside world altogether. First prize here should perhaps go to Buried, the abduction thriller that at no point leaves the sealed coffin inside which Ryan Reynolds’ bewildered trucker awakens. It’s a film to which Alfred Hitchcock would have raised a glass: a sucker for self-imposed strictures, his Rear Window, Rope, Lifeboat and Dial M for Murder all honour the idea that diminishing the space can ramp up the tension.
That idea is the central dogma of the home invasion subgenre – by definition a hotbed of single-location ingenuity. Ever since Laura La Plante was hounded around her mansion in The Cat and the Canary (1927), endless hours of nerve-shredding joy have been forged from a house, its occupant and a malevolent stranger or two. Hush and Don’t Breathe, two of the better recent efforts, throw a game-changing disability into the mix for good measure, their under-siege protagonists deaf and blind respectively. Both are little more than extended hide-and-seek sessions, though the former is a straightforward slasher, while the latter flips the formula mid-intrusion: a kind of Home Alone from hell.
While those films use their limitations to pile on the cabin fever, another strain of film, the man-v-nature fable, goes about using its setting to dwarf their heroes against the immensity of mother nature – think Robert Redford getting pummelled by the oceans in All Is Lost or Brendan Mackey dragging his mangled limbs across a Peruvian glacier in Touching the Void. (See also: Gus Van Sant’s two-guys-lost-in-the-desert tale Gerry.) Then there are the films that manage to do both: The Shallows, Open Water and 127 Hours all micro-engineer their premise to leave their characters oppressively trapped in a place of endless vastness.
Whether they’re all worth the price of a cinema ticket is another matter – an hour and a half is a long time to wait for a man to saw his own arm off – but certainly they are films whose setting is everything. Yet there are plenty of single-location movies whose location is beside the point: who knows whether The Breakfast Club’s mismatched misbehavers would have small-talked their way into each other’s hearts had they not been stuck in a boring classroom; likewise Kevin Smith’s foul-mouthed Clerks, whose mind-numbing surroundings were grist to the mill of the debates over their partners’ sexual histories and the contractual situation of the workers on the second Death Star.
Henry Fonda and co were debating something a little more consequential in 12 Angry Men, but in no less dull a place, Sidney Lumet’s film setting a trend for stage plays moving to the big screen with few concessions to the change of medium. In the same vein, Richard Linklater’s Tape shuns music, sound effects and external shots as three old school friends reconvene in a dingy motel room, with only a jumpy handheld camera to remind us that we’re watching a film. James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross didn’t even bother with that, giving itself over completely to the cartel of heavyweight actors who stalk the sharks’ pool of a real-estate office, and reaping the benefits accordingly.
But, as fine as most of the above films are, none delivers quite the level of visceral fun as The Raid, which pays minimal heed to dialogue, story or character as it follows an ensnared cop fist-fighting his way up a gang-occupied tower block, one floor at a time. It’s a single scene of claustrophobic tension, held together by a magnetic central performance. It’s also about as far from The Guilty as you can get. Funny thing, cinema.
