Jake Gyllenhaal plays Joe Baylor in The Guilty, a police officer working the emergency dispatch unit who pleads guilty to a crime at the end of the film — but why does he do it? Directed by Antoine Fuqua, the Netflix film is an adaptation of the 2018 Danish thriller of the same name. The Guilty is a one-man show as Gyllenhaal’s Joe believes he’s assisting a woman who has been kidnapped by her ex-husband. The truth that comes to light changes the entire trajectory of the film.
Over the course of the film, Joe is called by a journalist from the Los Angeles Times, asking him to offer a statement surrounding the upcoming court case. The Guilty is relatively vague about what the case entails or the reasons for Joe’s involvement. However, after revealing that he killed a 19-year-old boy to Emily, the woman he tries to help, Joe ends up pleading guilty for his actions. It’s a surprising twist because police officers so rarely admit to any wrongdoing despite evidence clearly pointing to the contrary.
In many ways, Joe tries to redeem himself in The Guilty. He figures that if he helps Emily, saves her from the clutches of her allegedly abusive ex, that he could be reminded of his heroism as a cop. This is especially true because Joe genuinely believes he’s a good guy who became a police officer to aid and protect others. However, when he realizes he was wrong all along about Emily, whose situation is not at all what it seems on the surface, Joe changes his mind about his own actions. He takes responsibility for them instead of continuing to hide behind a lie set up to protect him from the law. Understanding that Emily needed help that he, as a cop, wasn’t adept to provide — as well as jumping the gun in a bid to be the hero without knowing all of the details of her mental health situation — may have reaffirmed that he was in the wrong.
Joe’s situation with Emily made him see his own actions more clearly, peeling back layers to get to the truth of what he had done to Joseph. What’s more, Joe told Emily that he wanted to punish Joseph because he was angry and because he could (with the power he held as a cop far exceeding that of a teenager), which goes against the savior mentality he tried to uphold with regards to his job. The Guilty began with Joe idealizing his job and ended with the realization that And while Joe pleading guilty to his crimes doesn’t address the larger systemic issues of police brutality, the fact that he claims responsibility for killing someone is a step up considering he and his colleagues had crafted a story in defense of Joe’s actions, one that would have surely painted Joe as a good cop who made a mistake.
Joe pleading guilty for killing someone happens offscreen, but the moment isn’t any less crucial to the rest of the film. Joe will likely be in prison for a long time, and he knew the consequences of what would happen in the aftermath. But dealing with Emily’s case pushed him to do the very thing the police force would have protected him from. Had he not taken the call in The Guilty, the outcome of his court case would have probably been much different.
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