A Hijacking

In this outstanding thriller, a nightmare scenario unfolds when armed Somali pirates take over a Danish cargo ship in the Indian Ocean. Back in Copenhagen, the shipping company's no-nonsense CEO (Borgen's Soren Malling) is determined to stonewall the hijackers' financial demands, leaving the sympathetic ship's cook (Pilou Asbaek, another Borgen alumni) and other western crew members to sweat it out. While the film never quite portrays the Somalis as cartoonish bad guys, its focus is more on the fear and claustrophobia experienced by the captives and the weight of responsibility falling on a boss who's clearly winging it. Gary Skoldmjose Porter is especially convincing as the owners' jargon-spouting corporate security consultant - it's precisely what he does for a living off-screen. Writer/director Tobias Lindholm, who previously scripted the excellent wrong-man drama The Hunt (2012), calibrates every move in the anxious negotiations with assured precision, and although this means a preponderance of ship-to-shore dialogue, the results are gripping, with the action growing increasingly tense as gun-toting violence looms.