A lean Danish Captain Phillips – tense, claustrophobic, and shorn of Hollywood bombast.
A Hijacking, directed by top Danish director Tobias Lindholm, was released in the same year as the Tom Hanks blockbuster Captain Phillips, and essentially covers the same ground – the capture of a civilian tanker by Somalian pirates. But its approach to the subject is very different.
The film begins with the hijacking of the cargo ship MV Rozen somewhere in the Indian Ocean. It then follows the ordeal of ship’s cook Mikkel (played by Pilou Asbæk of Borgen and Game of Thrones fame) as he and the rest of the crew spend the ensuing months trying to survive on board in appalling conditions. But Mikkel is not the sole focus – the other half of the story depicts the shipping company negotiators, led by CEO Peter Ludvigsen, as they sit around dingy conference rooms in Copenhagen and figure out how best to get their crew home.
A Hijacking is not an action film. There are no adrenaline-filled chases or shootouts – in fact, I don’t think a gun is once fired on screen. Instead the film’s thrills come from a sense of sweaty, suffocating tension, steadily ratcheted up as the crew struggle to keep their sanity, the pirates become increasingly desperate, and the negotiators hit impasse after impasse. An impressive amount of drama is wrung from phone calls, and even faxes, between the two sides.
The performances are excellent. The very talented Pilou Asbæk is cropping up all over the place at the moment, and with good reason. Ludvigsen is played by Søren Malling, an actor you’ll know if you’ve watched any Danish TV (he played Jan Meyer in The Killing and Torben Friis in Borgen). Malling is fabulous here as the calmly professional company CEO, who battles to keep his personal emotions out of the negotiations and to suppress his guilt. As with Captain Phillips, the pirates themselves were cast from among Somalian locals and are all non-professional actors, which heightens the film’s authenticity and accentuates the cultural and linguistic gulf between the hijackers and the Danes.
A Hijacking is a sinewy, stripped-back nailbiter that is all the more enjoyable for being an effective alternative to the usual Hollywood fare.
Directed by: Tobias Lindholm, 2012
Grass and Vanilla 