Science-fiction is not a genre you could accuse of parading itself as Oscar bait. Few movies that flirt with the extraterrestrial have scored best picture nominations: ET, the first Star Wars – then, more recently, since the number of possible nominees was increased, District 9, Avatar, Inception, Her, Gravity and The Martian have sneaked in.
None won – though Gravity came close. Arrival is a film that echoes Alfonso Cuarón’s in some respects: the great beyond, the intense focus on its female lead, the loss of a child. But Denis Villeneuve’s drama is not a head-trip like that splashy immersion.
Rather, it is a heart-trip, which fiddles with your innards from the get-go. We begin with a montage, swoonily shot, scored by Max Richter’s immediately moving On the Nature of Daylight – a sequence that bookends the film and from which fragments punctuate it with increasing regularity.
Amy Adams is raising a baby, apparently solo, a child who becomes a daughter, and who dies in her early teens. Four minutes through and you’re already in tears. Then we’re in the present day: Adams is Louise, a linguistics professor whose lecture is interrupted by an alien invasion: 12 enormous spaceships, great rough, black, quasi-banana-shaped megaliths that hover gently above the ground, around the world.
And there they stay: the aliens have not quite landed, not yet expressed their intentions. Forest Whitaker recruits Louise, along with a scientist called Ian (Jeremy Renner), to try to work out what they want. She is tasked with interpreting a language that sounds like nothing you’ve heard before. Their first expedition to pow-wow with the visitors – vast squid-ish beasties who communicate mostly through intricate ink rings spurted on to glass – is so exciting, so wondrous, your breathing becomes as shallow as that of the actors.
The film moves forward, as Louise and Ian come under pressure to work out whether the world is in imminent danger of getting blown to bits, as they silently fall in love, as she gradually comes to realise that the language she’s learning may not be all it seems, and as we slowly twig that our own sense of story might be playing tricks on us.
If that sounds over-cryptic, it’s because the twists and turns of Arrival’s plot are so delicate that, when writing about it, one handles them as carefully as a newborn. This also means that the final third of the film – and its aftermath – come at you like an emotional Storm Doris, hitting like an epiphany.
What Arrival implies about how we experience time – in a far less linear fashion than most conventional narratives – is fantastic in both senses, but feels psychologically accurate. We are stuck in shuffle, it says, we do not pass through forever in the present.
It is a film to cheer despite the tragedy at its core, a story that tells us pain and love are interchangeable, that the latter is always worth the former, and that an embrace of this is the key to a reconciliation with mortality. It feels like a film to watch before you become a parent, with all that attendant terror and hope.
Arrival won’t take best picture on Sunday: not only is it the wrong genre, it lacks the razzle-dazzle of La La Land and the ardent backers of both Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea. Its best shot in the main awards is an adapted screenplay gong for Eric Heisserer, who has done miraculous things with Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life.
But beware. Arrival might not be a contender for the flagship honours (Adams doesn’t even have a nomination), but it is still nominated for nine awards, most of them technical. Could it be this year’s Mad Max: Fury Road, and emerge from the evening with the most – if not most prestigious – prizes?
It’s possible. But to watch the movie is to barely care. Earthbound concerns such as success and silverware evaporate. Arrival has bigger squid to fry.
