(Denmark, 103 min.)
Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm
Starring: Pilou
Asbæk, Søren Malling, Gary Skjoldmose Porter, Abdihakin Asgar.
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| Pilou Asbaek in A Hijacking, a Magnolia Films Release |
A captain goes
down with his ship. Tobias Lindholm crafts a compelling character study about a
highjacking on the high seas, but the captain to sink in this psychological
drama isn’t even aboard the ship. He’s a CEO named Peter, played by Søren Malling, all trimmed and dry
in his Copenhagen office while the men of one of his boats, the MV Rozen, sweat
it out on the ocean.
A squad of Somali pirates captures the Rozen as it sails off the coast of Mombasa during the final stretch of a trip. Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), the cook, has just called his wife to say he’ll only be a few more days. Cut to Copenhagen where Peter and the other suits of the company learn of the news.
Lindholm,
co-writer of the current release The Hunt,
constructs A Hijacking with a disorienting
speed. A Hijacking doesn’t present
the act of the hijacking itself, just what happens before and after, and
instead lets the negotiation of freeing the men of the Rozen offer the central
drama. This isn’t an action film but a realistic and finely-tuned character study.
The quick
exposition of A Hijacking at first
makes it difficult to tell whether Lindholm wants the audience to align with
Mikkel or Peter. Presumably, the man on the boat, who is forced to do the
negotiating for the pirates along with a translator named Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), is going to be the hero
and the voice of reason in A Hijacking;
however, Lindholm’s gritty approach almost defies sympathy for, and attachment
to, the characters in this tense situation. The film cuts back and forth between Mikkel and Peter as
both men do the talking to bring the situation to a resolution. Peter’s
objective, though, is mostly to save the company as much money and
embarrassement as possible, so his negotiation is a cool, almost clinical,
debate. The CEO shows little concern for his men in the first stages of the
process, as he refers to them more as assets than as human beings.
A Hijacking uses the kidnapping to paint a tale of corporate
greed in which people are chalked up in an economical tally of risk and
rewards. Peter’s first offer, for example, is a paltry $250 000 to match the
demand of $15 000 000 by the hijackers. He’s essentially playing with five
million dollars of free company money, though, as A Hijacking introduces Peter as he squeezes four and a half million
dollars out of a trio of Japanese business men in a game of boardroom hardball.
The negotiation is a game of Let’s Make a
Deal for Peter, not a case of loyalty or duty. His ego and reputation seem
to be a greater stake than the men who form the base of his operation.
A Hijacking is an unconventional rescue tale that lets the
audience watch a corporate suit play the hero, for Peter’s psyche slowly
crumbles as the negotiations draw out. The strain of the deal becomes visible
as the composed man begins to crack. Peter realizes the repulsiveness in
treating his own employees as numbers and becomes a surprisingly likable
anti-hero when the talks draw into the eleventh hour.
Lindholm
constructs a drama that is consistently compelling even though it entails little more than shot/reverse shots of
telephone conversations between Peter and Mikkel/Omar. Sparse handheld camerawork and minimal music give the
film a sense of immediacy as Lindholm eschews the more cinematic content with
the pirates and instead restricts the drama to the men of the negotiation.
Harsh lighting grants a sense of exhaustion to the claustrophobic setting of
both the boat and the boardroom. It’s a bold, bare-bones affair—rough and
tumble like a Paul Greengrass film gone Dogme 35.
If A Hijacking were an English-language
Paul Greengrass flick it might fill multiplexes across North America.
Coincidentally enough, Greengrass is at the helm of this year’s other
pirate-jacking movie Captain Phillips,
which stars Tom Hanks and opens this fall. Moviegoers will want to see A Hijacking first, though, to experience
the kind of white-knuckle tension that comes by focussing on the psychology of
the situation. When the film comes to its jarring finale—one can almost
pinpoint the moment in the negotiation realizes that the situation isn’t going
to end well—A Hijacking lets the
audience leave unnerved, possibly shaken, even though it ends with
near-conventional closure. A Hijacking
has an unsettling ending because the story for ends both ends neatly and messily for Peter at
the same time.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
