A HIJACKING

(Tobias Lindholm, 2012)

This enthralling, spare drama depicts the hijacking of a Danish freighter in the Indian Ocean by a band of Somali pirates.

As it starts, we think that Mikkel (Johan Philip Asbæck), the ship’s cook and an instantly warm and likeable fellow, will be our protagonist. But soon after he is introduced and before the hijacking occurs, Lindholm introduces Peter (Søren Malling), the CEO of the Company. He is a ruthless negotiator in the boardroom and something of a smooth operator, utterly in control of his business and each situation he finds himself in. We see the hijacking as he does – he is interrupted in the middle of a meeting with news that a ship may have been hijacked. All is confusion. Then Lindholm cuts back to Mikkel onboard, a Somali pirate waving an AK-47 in his face, and the twin strands of this narrative are made plain.

We see Peter attempt to negotiate with Omar, the English-speaking “translator” brought in by the Pirates, while Mikkel struggles to stay alive and sane as the days in captivity turn first into weeks and then into months.

Just as he did in his brusing prison drama R, Lindholm shoots this film with a raw, brutal efficiency; there is nothing ostentatious or flowery here. The storytelling is tight, the dedication to realism total. Performances are sweaty and emotional. Unexpectedly, while Mikkel begins to crumble in the face of the intimidation and depravation he encounters, Peter’s suffering mirrors it.

He is warned early on by a negotiation expert his firm has hired as a consultant that he must avoid emotional involvement, but he cannot, and the ordeal just about destroys him.

Lindholm makes great use of his confined locations, juxtaposing the filthy sweatboxes on board the ship with the sterile tension of the modern office the negotiators find themselves trapped within, just as the stained, ragged clothes the prisoners wear is contrasted with the tight tailoring of the executives we see in Copenhagen.

It’s a tremendously effective and gripping drama with a nasty ending and fine performances all round. On the strength of his first two films, Lindholm might well be a director to keep an eye on.

R

(Tobias Lindholm, Michael Noer, 2010)

R is everything a prison film should be; taut and pacy, grim and compelling, suspenseful and violent. The narrative superficially recalls Audiard's superb A Prophet, but it doesn't have that films ambition or transcendent qualities, settling instead for a pulp intensity which makes it a rewarding genre experience.
The story follows Rune, a young man beginning his first spell behind bars who finds himself in a Wing with a hardcore of experience lifers, most of them bulky, tattooed, shaven headed and utterly intimidating. They steal from and bully him from the off, his life a grinding series of humiliations and petty terrors, and he even has to attack another prisoner for them, in a starkly terrifying sequence of brutal violence, pity and fear. Finally, beginning to understand the hierarchies and systems around him, Rune devises a way to involve himself in the Prisons drug trade, and is suddenly a player. But that only makes everything even more complicated.
Shot in a confident mix of gritty, intimate close-ups and wide shots revealing the bleak dimensions of the Prison building itself, and with no music save a storm of electro-feedback which rises up tunelessly at regular intervals, Lindholm and Noer ensure their film is relentless in it's forward momentum, its protagonist propelled endlessly forward through one awful scenario after another.
The performances are uniformly convincing, mainly from a bunch of terrific Danish character actors, and the story works with something like the spring-coiled mechanism of a beartrap; you feel the ending coming, in all its awful inevitability, and it is grimly satisfying when it happens.

ARMADILLO

(Janus Metz, 2010)

The series of conflicts which resulted from the events of 11 September 2001 have spawned a number of exceptional documentaries. The technology available to journalists and filmmakers today - the sort of technology which means anybody with a cellphone can film news footage in the street and see it on the Internet minutes later - makes possible an unprecedented level of access to events in the field of conflict. Lightweight digital cameras, in particular, mean that one man can make a movie. They also suggest a pleasing verisimilitude; to a certain extent, we associate the visual characteristics of material shot with a light handheld camera with modern warfare. This means that even fictional portrayals of warfare have partially adopted this shooting style as a shortcut to visual legitimacy. If it's shot this way, it looks more realistic, seems to be the thinking.
Well, Armadillo is real. It follows a Unit of the Danish army through a tour in the Helmand Province in Afghanistan, tightly focusing upon five soldiers within the group. We witness them leave home, saying goodbye to tearful relatives at the Airport, then observe them through months of boredom and terror until we see their return to Denmark to those same families. It contains strong storytelling: the focus on just five men allows their characters to be well-established and Metz cleverly crosscuts between them, contrasting their personalities and reactions to the same events, just as a novel or War movie would treat the material if it were fictional. The deliberate nature of the storytelling is one of the reasons Armadillo sometimes feels more like fiction than a documentary; the other is its visual beauty. Cinematographer Lars Skree captures some absolutely stunning imagery here, the sort of thing we don't see much of in most War Documentaries.
The content is quite familiar as we see these men endure hours of tedium - with porn, wrestling, video games - and then shattering bursts of terrifying violence. That violence is always frighteningly banal, which is an aspect fictional films never capture, and beyond the explosions and the rattle of automatic weapons fire the most frightening sight here is the vacant shock in the eyes of a Dane who has just been shot and is being treated by medics. This is how it really is, his eyes seem to say.
Sensitive and profoundly respectful of the men fighting in the field - there are no politics here - and both articulate of the horror and appreciative of the thrill of warfare, Armadillo is a terrific, provocative, complex, exhilaratingly cinematic documentary on modern Warfare, fit to rank alongside other recent classics Restrepo and Gunner Palace.