Film still from A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s verité-like tale of a Danish cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates is rivetingly low-key
A nail-biter of a thriller that eschews conventional thrills, Tobias Lindholm's verité-like tale of a Danish cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates is rivetingly low-key.
The ship's genial cook (Pilou Asbaek) gradually unravels over the four months it takes the pirates to negotiate ransom terms with the shipping company CEO (Soren Malling), and Lindholm's movie, A Hijacking, becomes as much about the chasm separating boardroom from boat deck as it is about crime on the high seas.
While the company haggles to bring down the price for saving its employees' lives, the hostages themselves live uneasily in close quarters with their captors, a situation made more unnerving by the fact that the pirates can join in a birthday party one moment and thrust a gun barrel to a hostage's head the next.