Turning time on its head: Explaining the ending of Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’
Denis Villeneuve has fallen madly in love with sci-fi if his recent – and future – career trajectory is any indication, with Arrival getting the ball rolling on his extended flirtations with the cosmos in spectacular style.
Nominated for eight Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, the existential invasion story gradually builds towards a third-act reveal that doesn’t just come out of the blue but completely recontextualises everything that’s happened before while still fitting seamlessly into the narrative.
After dedicating herself to communicating with the aliens who’ve arrived on Earth with unexplained motives, Amy Adams’ Louise – and the audience – is struck by the revelation that the flashbacks showing her life with daughter Hannah aren’t flashbacks or memories, but visions of events that have not yet come to pass.
The heptapods don’t view or experience time linearly, and having mastered their language and developed a means to communicate, her brain has been rewired in much the same way. That means she can see things set to happen in the future along similar lines, which extends into the relationship with Jeremy Renner’s Ian that hasn’t even started yet in real-time, and the eventual birth of their daughter.
Tragically, it comes with the inescapability of Louise knowing Hannah only has 12 years to live and that Ian will leave her upon discovering she knew full well it was a fate she’d been made aware of before they’d even gotten together as a couple. Rewatching Arrival for a second time, though, and it becomes much more obvious.
Not only is the name ‘Hannah’ literally a palindrome that hints towards the non-linear events of Louise’s life, but she tells her daughter that Ian abandoned them because she “told him something that he wasn’t ready to hear,” making it clear he’d left because she’d neglected to tell him the child was never going to make it past the age of 12.
In the real-time story, Ian professes his love for Louise and asks if she wants to have a baby with him. She agrees, even though her experience with the heptapods has guaranteed it’s destined to end in nothing but tragedy.
What is Arrival about?
Although it technically starts at the end, given what unfolds during the climax, the viewer is initially led to believe that Louise is a grieving mother before the alien arrival. Unidentified spaceships have landed all over the planet, with Forest Whitaker’s Weber roping in Adams and Renner’s scientists to investigate.
Seeking to explain the arrival, the pair are tasked to find a way to communicate with the intergalactic beings, who appear to be non-threatening and non-aggressive and even earn the nicknames of Abbott and Costello. Linguistics professor Louise takes a major chance in trying to interact directly with the heptapods, which not only gives her an understanding of their dialect but upends her entire world.
Is Arrival based on a book?
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer went down a scientific rabbit hole when crafting the script for Arrival, but at least he didn’t have to conjure the story out of thin air. It may not have been based on a novel, but the film nonetheless has literary origins.
Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life was first published in 1998, but it would be almost two decades before the live-action adaptation hit screens. When it did, it maintained plenty of faithfulness to the source material, albeit with Heisserer and director Villeneuve bringing their own talents to the fore.
