Copilot is a tragic romance set in the shadow of 9/11

► Copilot is in UK cinemas from 10 September.

In the opening scene of Copilot, Asli (Canan Kir) meets Saeed (Roger Azar) at an amusement park near their school in Germany. They are on the same ride, but he steps off at the last moment, ostensibly out of fear, and watches from the sidelines. She watches him too but loses sight of him as the ride spins, then catches a brief, blurry glimpse only to lose him again.

This trip to an amusement park is one of the real-life details that Anna Zohra Berrached folds into her fictional retelling of the relationship between Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese pilot who hijacked Flight 93 on 11 September 2001, and his Turkish girlfriend, Aysel Şengün. The 9/11 attacks, among the most defining events of our time, aren’t more than a spectre over the film. Instead of a forensic deconstruction of what led to Ziad’s extreme act, Berrached gives us an intimate, if elliptical, glimpse into his relationship.

After months of courtship, Saeed and Asli decide to marry, despite her mother’s fervent disapproval of her union with an Arabic man. They elope, but soon Saeed becomes extremely religious and increasingly secretive, frequently disappearing without explanation. While he’s away, she continues to live her life – studying, visiting her mother, feeding her cat – but listlessly, as if on autopilot. He leaves once again for flight school in Florida, and when she visits we’re surprised to see him integrated into this decadent, secular environment; he drives a convertible and wears aviator sunglasses and polo shirts. If this persona shift rings any alarm bells for her, she does not let on. Perhaps it is simply another caprice of her mercurial and mysterious husband.

Saeed’s fragmentation in part reflects Germany’s own uneasy identity in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berrached gestures towards this tension – particularly in the contrast between Saeed and his countryman Farres (Nicolas Chaoui), who embodies the vision of cultural integration by starting a family and a business with a white German woman – but doesn’t fully explore it. Neither does Berrached attempt to explain Saeed’s transformation from secular, fun-loving dental student to alienated extremist (an omission some might see as negligence). Instead, she is laser-focused on Asli’s devotions to Saeed, born from the cultural tensions in which she was raised. Asli’s passive loyalty to Saeed is frustrating but not completely unrelatable; it isn’t a mystery how his withholding and unpredictability would make her long for him all the more.

Only at the end of the film, after he has committed the atrocious attack, does Asli begin to confront how her love turned into complicity. It’s an ironic, tragic take on the old adage about the great woman behind the man.