Jake Gyllenhaal Thriller Movie Hits No. 1 on Netflix

Jake Gyllenhaal is back in Netflix’s top movie chart thanks to The Guilty, his newest film. The Guilty reunites him with Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua and was written by True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto. The crime thriller features an all-star cast supporting Gyllenhaal, including Riley Keough, Ethan Hawke, Paul Dano, and Peter Sarsgaard.

The Guilty debuted on Netflix Friday following a limited theatrical release. It finished its first weekend on the streaming platform at number one on the Top Movies in the U.S. chart. Overall, it came in at number two, behind the international smash hit Squid Game and just ahead of Maid, a Netflix original miniseries starring mother-daughter duo Andie MacDowell and Margaret Qualley.

In the new film, Gyllenhaal stars as Joe Baylor, a troubled Los Angeles Police Department officer who works the night shift at a 911 call center. The movie has earned mostly positive reviews from critics, but many have noted that it doesn’t quite hold a candle to the original. It is a remake of the 2018 Danish film of the same name, starring Jakob Cedergren as a Copenhagen police officer assigned to answer emergency calls after he shot and killed a 19-year-old. Fans of Gyllenhaal’s film can easily check out the original since it is streaming on Hulu. The Danish Guilty was directed by Gustav Möller and written by Möller and Emil Nygaard Albertsen.

This is not the first time Gyllenhaal made a movie for Netflix. He also gives a bonkers performance as the zoologist Johnny Wilcox in Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja, a satire on the meat industry released in 2017. In 2019, Gyllenhaal starred in Velvet Buzzsaw, which was written and directed by his Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy. In Velvet Buzzsaw, Gyllenhaal starred as art critic Morf Vanderwalt. He also made a bizarre appearance as Mr. Music in John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch (2019). Zodiac (2007), which features one of Gyllenhaal’s very best performances, and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals (2016) are also streaming on Netflix.

Gyllenhaal, 40, is an Oscar nominee for his performance in Brokeback Mountain. His next movie is Ambulance, directed by Michael Bay and based on another Danish movie. Ambulance is about a working-class man who joins a criminal friend for a bank heist so he can pay for his wife’s surgery. Universal plans to release the film on Feb. 18, 2022.