YouTube clip of a kidnapped woman calling an emergency dispatcher while her kidnapper sat nearby. Möller was struck by how much an audio clip could convey on its own with no visual accompaniment. "It felt like I was seeing images just listening to sound," he said. "It felt like I had seen this woman; I had an idea of the car she was sitting in and the road they were driving on." Another influence was the podcast Serial, about the 1999 murder of a Maryland student. "With every episode I got new information about the people involved and the places and occurrences. With every episode my image of these people changed." Möller and co-writer Emil Nygaard Albertsen followed up by doing research at Danish dispatch centers, the characters emerged from there, including the idea of the main character being a police officer under investigation, who had been reassigned from the field to desk duty. The research also inspired the intentionally drab set. "When I got out to the first dispatch center, I had expected something much more high tech," Möller said. "And then I saw this room that looked like a shitty office and I loved that. I loved that contrast of these cops dealing with life and death and they're sitting in this boring, kind of dirty room. So that's what I wanted in the production design." Confining the film to a police dispatch center helped limit the budget to a frugal €500,000 (US$570,671) while forcing the filmmakers to work more creatively. Möller and his director of photography, Jasper Spanning, divided the script into eight segments, changing the camera lenses and cinematic approach for each. The screen time for each segment ultimately ranged from 5 to 35 minutes. Filming employed a three-camera setup and took 13 days. Post-production sound editing took another eight weeks. Distribution rights to The Guilty in the United States were acquired by Magnolia Pictures at the Sundance Film Festival when the film first premiered there. Reception Critical reception , the film holds approval rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes based on reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, "Sleek, well-acted, and intelligently crafted, The Guilty is a high-concept thriller that wrings maximum impact out of a handful of basic—and effective—ingredients." Metacritic assigned the film a normalized score of 83 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "universal