Rating: 15
DVD/BD Release Date:
26th August 2013 (UK)
Director:
Tobias Lindholm
Cast:
Pilou Asbæk, soren malling, Dar Salim
Buy/rent:
[Blu-ray]
[DVD]
It's not much of a pirate's life for ship's cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), who becomes the victim of a hijacking in Tobias Lindholm's gruelling tale of piracy in the Indian Ocean.
Lindholn co-wrote last year's superbly tense The Hunt, and he excels once more with a drama is low on the sort of swashbuckling frippery that has been prevalent in much of the recent pirate fare Indeed, the vast bulk of the film plays out post-hijacking as the increasingly desperate Mikkel plays a long and excruciating waiting game; tortuously dragged out over many weeks.
Meanwhile, half a world away in his Copenhagen office, Mikkel's boss prowls the corridors and walks a psychological tightrope of his own as he plays chief negotiator with the captors via their irritable translator.
Lindholm's steady, brooding film is sparse on frills but flooded with tension. A documentary aesthetic gives the whole piece a hyper-real sense of desperate, miserable futility. For poor Mikkel and his shipmates trapped aboard their floating prison the abyss looms large with little hope of salvation.
Raw and glossless it may be, but A Hijacking is nevertheless tough, claustrophobic and relentlessly tense. If your idea of a great pirate movie is all chattering parrots and rum, do yourself a favour and hoist the white flag.
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