Arrival

One of the interesting things about Arrival is that it uses your own literacy of the medium to trick you.

There is no particular reason why the opening montage of Louise Banks having, and then losing, her daughter had to be backstory. It could be a How We Got Here opening (indeed it is) but for the fact that no film which wasn't playing a dirty trick would how-we-got-here from such a gentle bitter-sweet character defining montage. We go in with expectations, this is a big budget Hollywood film after all, if it opens with a lengthy encapsulation of a character's life we assume that it does so in order to introduce the character to us.That is what we are expecting in any case: to be introduced to the characters. We assume it would not introduce the character from where she is at the end of the film, we are here to experience her journey, not appreciate her destination.

Louise Banks' subsequent distracted air, apparently sleepwalking through her life, has been called a Kuleshov Effect, an impression formed in the audience's mind by the juxtaposition of the daughter's death. I do not think this is justified. Banks reacts markedly differently to the alien's arrival than anyone else at the university, and not because of any professional interest at the time. Maybe Amy Adams played the scenes straight and I'm projecting a distracted air onto her, but the fact of her actions in the script betray that the film is playing a trick on us.

Also, what's she doing knocking about in that enormous house by the lake if she had not previously filled it with a family?



Ultimately, the film cannot sustain the trick as long as it wants for the same reason: our understanding of how it works.

From the opening montage on I was wondering where daddy was. At first I assumed he'd died while she was pregnant, but it still seemed odd not to see him at all. Again, this is a big budget Hollywood film, it shares a value system with it's audience. If, say, Banks had been artificially inseminated to have a daughter by herself the film would have needed to address that. If there was a man present at the conception the film would have deemed him important enough to mention, even if he played exactly no part in the story.

A book, which can focus solely on the mind of its protagonist, might have gotten away with this. A film deals in pictures from a third party viewpoint, and in any picture of a mother and daughter there is always going to be a space where the father isn't.

I did not work out the twist till, in a late flash-forward, Banks tells her daughter to ask her father about science questions, so it kept me guessing till very nearly the end. But I always knew there was something to guess. I knew it was playing a trick.