We all use cinematic shorthand when describing a new movie to friends or review readers. It’s not unreasonable to expect a certain cinema literacy among fellow movie lovers.

So pitching the French sailing thriller “Tout le monde m’appelle Mike” — “Everyone Calls Me Mike” — as a tight and tense variation on “Dead Calm,” one of the just-passed Sam Neill’s finest hours and Nicole Kidman’s early break, puts everybody on the same page. “Dead Calm” is a classic.

But “Mike’s” also got a lot in common with Roman Polanski’s early classic, “Knife in Water,” with a taste of “Captain Phillips” thrown in.

There’s piracy off the Somali coast, and an uneasy, not-wholly-trusting triangle of sailors — one of them a pretty woman — giving the film a sexual edge. The violence that comes begins with a Somali pirate kidnapping, but doesn’t end there.

So it’s as immersive as its antecedents, in small boat at sea terms, and just different enough from “Dead Calm” to keep one guessing where it might go.

She and her pre-school son met dashing Jean (Pierre Lottin) in the French port of Toulon, Isabelle (Daphné Patakia) narrates. As he looks like a young David Thewlis and has a 44 foot ketch, the Monika, she takes him seriously when he suggests they sail off together.

Yes, they’re broke, but “We’ll find jobs on the road,” he’s reassured her. He seems a competent and confident mariner, and since she “didn’t want to think through” the possibilities of skipping this chance to ditch her French life and go on an adventure, she took the plunge.

Five year old Damien (Thibault Dierickx) is along for the ride, and the experience of a lifetime.

They’ve crossed the Med and transited the Suez Canal and the Red Sea when we pick up their story in the former French colony of Djibouti, where they’re having engine trouble. That’s not the only potential trouble, they know. But perhaps someone should have read the name of the strait offshore to them on their charts, “Gate of Tears.”

But they’re wary enough as it is, not leaving without that engine water pump repair because it wouldn’t do to be off of “Aden without a motor.” It’s not just tides, winds and currents that worry sailors in that part of the world. Jean listens to the radio chatter between sailboats, ships and the Task Force guarding against piracy in those waters.

That nighttime taxi ride back through town to the boat has them alarmed.

“Where are you taking us?”

An accident makes naive, idealistic Isabelle demand they stop and help. The driver is reluctant. And sure enough, the mob that forms in the dark blames the “white woman” for all this. They escape with only a busted windshield.

But the driver needs them to pay for that. And they still need that water pump. “Everyone calls me Mike,” he says. And Mike (Abdirisak Mohamed) takes Jean hither and yon to find a replacement or a repair among acquaintances, friends and relatives.

Mike seems friendly enough. But Mike doesn’t want to stay here. He wants to sail with them. He can swim, he assures them, and he has useful skills beyond his ability to translate between local languages and French (with English subtitles). Or so he says.

As one of his local contacts has rattled Jean with the offer to sell an AK-47 assault rifle “because you’ll need one, where you’re going,” non-violent Jean gives it some thought. Mike eventually talks Jean into it.

But he hasn’t seen Mike pack a pistol and disguise his goodbyes to relatives. The viewer has.

The first signs of trouble come when we see Isabelle engage in that favorite French pastime of topless sunbathing as she takes in the dolphins riding the Monika’s waves. Mike is Muslim.

“Why don’t you wear a shirt,” our poker-faced novice sailor wonders as she grabs the wheel from him to evade obstacles in the water?

It won’t be long before opportunistic Somali fishermen, bitching about foreigners fishing out their coast, spy them and do what their AK-47 and nerve allows them to do. That “Task Force” is unreachable by radio. Will Mike help, or is he in on this?

First-time feature writer-director Guillaume Bonnier makes great use of the confines of a small (ish) boat as a setting and DP David Grinberg serves up lots of seascapes, sunsets and dolphin chases in the azure blue sea to put the viewer in that world with these four people.

The film’s brevity limits the incidents and the suspense that should build in them. But that doesn’t prevent “Everyone Calls Me Mike” from paying lip service to the grievances of the long exploited and colonized as it shows the futility of naive idealism that puts the Westerners at the mercy of desperately poor people with guns and dreams of riches and/or “escape.”

The subtexts of idealism, racism and simple race hatred are tinged with just enough sexual tension to merit mentioning, which maintains the “Where is this going?” mystery of the narrative. Isabelle’s impulsive nature compounds that. What’s she capable of?

This indie French thriller isn’t “Dead Calm” or even “Knife in the Water.” But it serves up suspense and violence and how no difficulty at all in putting us in “their” shoes — the French “their” or the Horn of Africa “their.”

Rating: violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Pierre Lottin, Daphné Patakia, Abdirisak Mohamed, Thibault Dierickx and
Saïd Helaf

Credits: Scripted and directed by Guillaume Bonnier. An Indiepix releasse.

Running time: 1:28