15, 111 mins





United 93 is an obituary for a commercial flight from Newark to San Francisco that ended in a field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Like most obituaries it is the small, vivid details that make its short life so compelling. A Boeing 757 is held to ransom at 35,000ft by four nervous hijackers. They barely speak a word of English. One rips open his jacket to expose a bomb strapped to his waist. A second plunges a knife into the neck of a first-class passenger. Two others storm the cockpit, murder the captain and navigator and seize the controls. The plane bucks wildly. Terrified strangers hurtle to the economy seats at the rear. The panic is ghastly: all the more so for being utterly real.

The wider significance of these electric moments is brilliantly analysed by Martin Amis on the front page of times2. The way they are painted by the director Paul Greengrass is an act of gut-wrenching art. The power of his film springs from that ghostly no man’s land between documentary and fiction where everything seems to ring true, yet you wonder (in horror) how on earth he could possibly know. Much of what actually happened on this doomed voyage is thoughtful speculation: the magazine picture of Capitol Hill pinned to the joystick; the breakfast trolleys tossed down the gangway to keep mutinous passengers at bay; and the cavalry charge that ultimately ended in defeat.

The heroic point about United 93 is that a substantial number of travellers decide to rebel. Directors have a tendency to behave like Pontius Pilate in these fraught situations and Greengrass is no exception. He makes a case for the suicidal terrorists by presenting no case at all. They are as human and desperate as their hostages, and the performances — uncredited in the 65 pages of programme notes that I received — are terrific. Particularly Khalid Abdalla’s Lebanese leader, Ziad Jarrah, who agonises silently about the wisdom of the mission and the family he is about to lose. He doesn’t have to say a word for you to know that he is cut from a more sophisticated and complex cloth than his fellow al-Qaeda recruits.

What Greengrass manipulates with sublime skill is the creeping sense of unease: the shots of crumpled faces; the door of the plane being shut like a coffin; the safety demonstration to which no one pays the slightest bit of notice; and the blips of aircraft on distant radars that seem to have a mind of their own.

The absence of stars underpins the shrivelling realism of his close camera angles. The gossipy stewardesses and self-absorbed passengers are marvellously served by a cast of complete unknowns. The mobile calls to loved ones — and the communal sense of frustration, confusion and anger — prick tears. The fight to the death is one of the most humbling things that I’ve ever seen on screen.

The sensation is how many of the original players came back to relive their traumatic parts. Notably Ben Sliney, as the chief air traffic control officer for the FAA, and Major James Fox, the senior director of weapons. The criminal lack of communication is as alarming as the footage of planes hitting the twin towers. There is so much to absorb — deliberately so — that any black-and-white perspective is almost impossible to reach and perhaps harder to comprehend. This is truly rare cinema, and the high-water mark of Greengrass’s most provocative work.

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