Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm who has made more hay as a scriptwriter for Thomas Vinterberg (Submarino, The Hunt, Another Round). He was also involved in Mindhunter.
Things go as it says on the tin: in the mode of realism we're shown a boat somewhat close to Mumbai in the Indian Ocean. The cook (Pilou Asbæk) unloads a series of Chekhovian devices — he'll be a few days late home, they're low on drinking water, he misses his wife and daughter — before the titular hijacking occurs off-screen. The whole show is intercut with scenes in wintry Denmark where the CEO of the shipping company (Søren Malling) is shown to be a master negotiator.
This initial framing is promising enough but not cashed very well. The Englishman hijacking expert (Gary Skjoldmose Porter) does not explain to us how these things typically go and so we have no way of assessing the progress of the negotiation or the CEO's performance except by watching the movie's runtime expire. His piratical counterpart Omar (Abdihakin Asgar) has a few good scenes but a limited strategy (give the-pirates-not-me more money or they'll start the killing). Therefore and despite the odd bit of threatening-with-a-gun and epistemic gaps — what happens to the rest of the crew? — the whole thing is insufficiently tension-inducing. The concluding scene on the boat is ridiculous but perhaps clarifies Omar's relationship to the pirates.
The acting is solid. The jittery cinematography is tired.
