A Hijacking is now showing at Manchester’s Cornerhouse – get your ticket’s here.
For a movie called A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s Danish drama/thriller spends very little time dealing with any ‘hijacking’ (at least if you’re thinking Hollywood-style big guns, witty one-liners and fast getaways).
Instead, the tense and claustrophobic setting of a rust-bucket cargo ship, as its small crew is taken hostage in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is the perfect vessel for Lindholm to explore the value of human life.
While we never get to really see the act itself, A Hijacking focuses on the painfully drawn-out and mentally exhausting negotiations between Somali pirates and the board of directors back home in Denmark, who they hope to extort $15million from.
Aside from the fear of living in a hostage situation for weeks on end by captors who cannot speak their language, the film also captures the mindless boredom faced by the unkempt and hungry crew, as they eat, sleep and toilet in a room made for one.
Even more brilliantly, A Hijacking exhibits the uncertain and precarious relationship between captured and captor, as the ship’s Danish cook (Pilou Asbaek) and engineer bond with the rifle-wielding Somali pirates over cigarettes and fishing, only to find the same men treating them like dogs a few days later.
Sublimely switching between the squalid conditions of the cargo ship and the sterile boardrooms back home in Denmark, the audience isn’t given much room to breathe.
In fact, the office scenes in which company CEO Peter (superbly played by Soren Malling) wrangles with the pirate translator over phone and fax, take on even more momentous proportions than the hostage scenes, as chess game-like pseudo-diplomatic bargaining plays out with increasingly frayed nerves and sleepless nights.
The painstakingly methodical approach to the deliberations by those back home and on board is at once harrowing and scarily believable.
A Hijacking will leave you questioning the value we assign to a human life, money and even personal possessions.
Image courtesy of Arrow Films, via YouTube, with thanks.
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