Arrival, film review: Close encounters of a charming kind

Director Denis Villeneuve is spare with his SFX but every shot has visceral clout
Charlotte O'Sullivan11 November 2016

In the beginning was the word, but maybe the title of this sci-fi epic should be an emoji. The central character is a linguistics expert (Amy Adams) who, asked to communicate with beings from another planet, discovers that the creatures use dark, liquid, mostly circular pictures to get their message across.

Adams is superb as Dr Louise Banks, a woman rubbed raw by grief (through flashbacks we discover that she had a daughter who, in her late teens, developed cancer and died).

Adams is the kind of actor who never drifts through films. In one of her earliest appearances, in TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she had a bit-part as a viciously conservative country girl. Shiny as a metal spoon, her character smiles adorably, then spits out the words, “You selfish bitch!”

Adams has been delivering subtle shocks ever since. Intense in sweet comedies (Enchanted) as well as sour thrillers (most recently Nocturnal Animals), her secret weapon is that she rarely chooses dumb scripts.

Hello, hello: linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) tries to talk to aliens

Here, the basic plot, admittedly, feels pretty familiar: several spaceships have landed on Earth and various groups of humans race to establish if the extraterrestrials are friends or foes.

Louise’s Montana-based team includes ruggedly handsome scientist Ian (Jeremy Renner). Naturally the two start to have feelings for each other. And even for a pair of the aliens (who Ian dubs Abbott and Costello).

Writer Eric Heisserer (working from a short story by Ted Chiang) uses humour, quirky little details and a heartbreaking twist to make his project stand out. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure drew attention to a gap between what he called the signifier (the sound or image used to denote a thing) and the signified (the mental concept). The smart yet child-friendly script makes such distinctions come alive. As Louise (after a disastrous first meeting) develops a lexicon of understanding with Costello, the pair, themselves, become more than words and pictures.

Blockbusters have to work as spectacle. Director Denis Villeneuve is certainly spare with his SFX but every shot has visceral clout. So many sci-fi blockbusters are stuffed with bright-white interiors and/or cavernous CGI realms. Here, by contrast, the inside spaces are murky and the majority of the panoramas realistic. You feel as if you’re wondering around Anish Kapoor sculptures on the greyest of days. Right before Louise’s hair bleeds into the atmosphere and her mind gets blown.

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1/99

Another plus is the silky editing (indebted to Anne V Coates’s work with Nic Roeg). And even the drab title works. The word “arrival” pales next to Jonathan Glazer’s “birth”, say (or Alfonso Cuaron’s “gravity”). It’s a non-event, which is entirely appropriate for a fable — a by-turns hilarious and shattering triumph — which pivots on false starts.

Cert 12A, 116 mins

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