Jake Gyl­len­haal races against time in the first trail­er for The Guilty

Back in 2018, one-loca­tion thriller The Guilty was a sur­pris­ing sleep­er suc­cess on both sides of the Atlantic, seiz­ing audi­ences in its native Den­mark as well as the US. It was the sort of lucra­tive, eas­i­ly trans­lat­able suc­cess that Hol­ly­wood just can’t resist remak­ing in the Eng­lish lan­guage, and today we’re get­ting a first look at how that exact project has played out.

The first trail­er for the Antoine Fuqua-direct­ed, Jake Gyl­len­haal-star­ring, ful­ly Amer­i­can­ized rework of The Guilty has arrived online, and those fond of the original’s closed-door ten­sion will find that there’s still plen­ty of that to go around. Though footage of for­est fires places us more rec­og­niz­ably in Amer­i­ca, Fuqua and screen­writer Nic Piz­zo­lat­to don’t seem to have tam­pered with what worked the first time around.

While the nation­al con­text may have shift­ed, the fool­proof plot­ting remains the same; Gyl­len­haal plays a 911 respon­der who receives a har­row­ing call from a woman talk­ing to a child, a ploy he soon rec­og­nizes as the tac­tic of a cap­tive. She covert­ly con­veys that she’s being held in a white van, and so begins a long night of des­per­ate attempts to tri­an­gu­late her posi­tion and stage a res­cue, with Gyllenhaal’s char­ac­ter Joe Bayler con­duct­ing it all from his desk at the call center.

The locked-door set­up places the focus on Gyl­len­haal, but the cast list for the film also includes Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Paul Dano, and Peter Sars­gaard in not-yet-spec­i­fied roles. (Lis­ten close­ly to the trail­er, and it’s clear that Keough is the woman call­ing.) If this film real­ly hews to the spir­it of its inspi­ra­tion, those actors may just con­tribute vocal work with­out show­ing up onscreen, their char­ac­ters lim­it­ed to the phone.

The film will soon pre­mière at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val before going glob­al on Net­flix soon after­ward. As promis­ing as the con­cept might be, it’s hard not to approach this with a slight sense of unease – Hollywood’s track record with Amer­i­can­iz­ing pop­u­lar imports from Europe is not the strongest.

The Guilty comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 24 Sep­tem­ber, then Net­flix world­wide on 1 October.