A Hijacking
September 2013
The captivating realism of Danish cinema and television is back in vogue nearly two decades after Dogme 95 briefly threatened to revolutionise cinema. It is the small screen output of the Danes that is currently in demand with shows such as The Killing, The Bridge and Borgen engaging audiences across the globe to continue the golden age of television drama, which began with HBO in the mid to late 90s thanks to Oz and The Sopranos.
A Hijacking’s writer and director Tobias Lindholm is one of the major players of the Danish renaissance and is a student of Dogme. He wrote 20 episodes of Borgen, a political drama about the Danish prime minister, and is responsible for the screenplay of 2012’s grim Jagten (The Hunt) with director Thomas Vinterberg (who helmed Dogme’s original and best film, Festen (The Celebration)).
A thriller on the high seas, A Hijacking is not a thriller in the Hollywood sense, yet it contains more moments of drama, tension and action than 99 percent of Blockbuster’s ‘Thriller’ section with its simple yet engaging documentarystyle story and direction. Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek, who plays the spin doctor Kasper from Borgen) is a cook onboard a Danish cargo ship, which has been boarded by Somali pirates who hold the crew to ransom.
This premise (a cook on a hijacked ship) may recall that of Under Siege but A Hijacking is as close to a Steven Seagal picture as Lars von Trier is to Michael Bay. The pirates negotiate the ransom with the CEO (Peter, played by Soren Malling, another Borgen veteran) of the ship’s parent company in Denmark. With the help of a professional negotiator (on both sides) they try and drive the ransom’s value like a boardroom deal: clinical, emotionless with both parties fighting to lock in the right price.
While this seemingly trivial negotiation drags on, Mikkel and the men onboard the cargo ship continue to be held as prisoners in horrible conditions by the unpredictable Somali pirates. Not a feast for the eyes in a cinematic sense, A Hijacking is instead a fly on the wall look at people being treated like a commodity. A Hijacking ain’t pretty– in more ways than one – but it sure is moving and utterly believable in these times as the drama splits between the boat and the boardroom to great effect.
In cinemas from September 19
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