A nail-biting thriller so good a remake was announced 6 months later races against the streaming clock

Remakes are part and parcel of the movie business, but the speed at which acclaimed Danish thriller The Guilty was a acquired was enough to make your head spin.

Co-writer and director Gustav Möller’s intense thriller boasted an ingenious central premise, a breathlessly brief running time, and an incredible performance from Jakob Cedergren as Asger Holm, an emergency services dispatcher who answers a call from a kidnapped woman and finds himself determined to beat the clock and save her from certain doom.

With Cedergren anchoring almost every frame on his own, The Guilty deservedly won widespread plaudits and a 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes score. The film only released in June of 2018, but six months later it was announced that Jake Gyllenhaal had purchased the rights to develop a do-over as a starring vehicle himself, which eventually ended up on Netflix.

While Antoine Fuqua’s spin on The Guilty was remarkably solid in its own right, it was still inferior to its illustrious predecessor in almost every way, even if star and producer Gyllenhaal did give a tour-de-force turn of his own as the remake racked up viewing figures like it was nobody’s business.

It’s the original that’s making a splash on streaming this weekend, though, with FlixPatrol revealing The Guilty to be one of the top-viewed titles on ViaPlay, where it’s even cracked the Top 10 in the United Kingdom. As mentioned, remakes of foreign-language smash hits are inevitable, but half a year between the OG’s debut and the redux’s reveal is breakneck even by Hollywood standards.