The Danish thriller The Guilty" is so good that there’s no way Hollywood won’t ruin it. 

The concept behind Gustav Moller’s 911 phone operator thriller – an officer trying to stop a kidnapping while stuck behind his desk – is so tightly effective, and the execution so smartly gripping, that there’s no way some American studio won’t pay it the ultimate compliment (and insult) by pegging it for a remake, where it’ll shed its subtitles and suddenly sprout a tumorous explosive car chase finale to make sure nobody’s bored. 

But let’s save the lamenting for when "The Guilty" becomes yet another Mark Wahlberg flexing hero fantasy and, for now, just revel in celebrating one of the best thrillers of the year.

A fun-sized procedural with super-sized tension, Moller’s film starts at the desk of Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a Danish police officer demoted down to 911 call center duty. Stuck handling phone calls from panicked speed addicts and robbed red-light district patrons with dismissive boredom, one phone call finally shakes Asger’s bemused malaise and grabs his attention: a woman kidnapped by her angry ex-husband, on the road to … somewhere.

In an exceptionally taut 85 minutes, the case takes plenty of twists and turns, all while staying put at Asger’s desk (OK, it switches to a new desk midway through and, at one point, takes an adventurous detour all the way over to the water cooler) with the increasingly panicked police officer, trying to prevent a crime happening miles away, helpless save for his headset, his phone line a family’s only lifeline. 

Considering the bare-bones nature of the script – written by Moller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen – a viewer doesn’t have to strain too hard to see some of the twists coming Asger’s way, both in his kidnapping case and in the case that sent him to the call center in the first place. There’s little place to hide in an approach this simple and stripped down. 

And yet The Guilty" impressively never loses your attention or lets your pulse drop. Moller smartly disperses info and clues generously throughout the movie, constantly giving Asger and the audience something new to chew on or a new sense of stakes and escalating dread. The kidnapped wife’s kids back home are soon on the line with Asger, while the desperate cop recruits his partner to do the detective work he can’t – and maybe shouldn’t.

The setting may never change in "The Guilty," but where Asger and the viewer stand on the case always seems to be thrillingly shifting – without breaking the film’s realism or giving up its commitment to its inherently brilliant bit: being in a place of complete safe control, power and knowledge, yet having none of it. Certainly less than Asger thinks, at least. 

A drab call center isn’t the most vibrant visual canvas to work with – especially when you handcuff yourself to it – but Moller makes efficient use of his limited space, painting the office in effectively chilly, cold shadows with the occasional splash of an ominous red light when a call comes in. 

The sound mix is where Moller stretches his legs out a little more, drawing crackling tension out of what Asger can and can’t hear and subtly putting the caller’s voice in the room with Asger as they bond in unexpected ways over the day’s drama. The final mix is so immersive that the audience ends up quite literally on the edge of their seat, straining to hear all they can of each limited hint, each sound a tense make or break cut through the dead air.

Moller’s best move, however, might’ve been casting Cedergren in the lead. If you’re going to put on a one-man show, that better be one compelling man at the center of it – and Cedergren is up to the challenge, slowly peeling away Asger’s disinterest and controlled calm and revealing the stressed cracks of desperation underneath our neutered hero. "The Guilty" solely rests on his shoulders, and he delivers a big performance – not in terms of volume, but in terms of portraying a fascinating slow boil behind a desk. 

Again, seasoned crime procedural fans might beat "The Guilty" to its final third-act punches, but thanks to Cedergren’s performance and Moller’s absurdly tense, perfectly calculated build, it doesn’t lessen its impact, a haunting lesson on the costs of certainty and the thin line between what you know, what you don’t and what you don’t know that you don’t know. 

Here’s what I know, though: Hollywood would be fools to not want to remake this – and they’d be even more foolish to actually do it. "The Guilty" gets it right the first time.

"The Guilty" will show one more time on Sunday, Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Jan Serr Studio Cinema.