Sneaky Sunday: Arrival Shows You Its Ending in the Opening Scene
Arrival (2016, Denis Villeneuve, from Eric Heisserer’s screenplay based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life”) begins with a short montage of a woman raising a daughter, from infancy to a fatal illness. Then twelve alien spacecraft appear over the Earth, and Louise Banks, a linguist, is recruited by the U.S. Army to learn how to talk to the visitors. Everything that follows is a first-contact procedural: vocabulary, misreadings, diplomatic panic. Sneaky Sunday is for films whose twist is already in plain view, and this one puts it on screen in the first few minutes.
The Twist
The opening montage is not a flashback. Louise’s daughter, Hannah, hasn’t been born yet. As Louise learns the heptapods’ written language, which doesn’t treat time as a line, she starts to experience her life the way they do, and the “memories” of a daughter she seems to have lost are glimpses of the future. The same ability is what saves the day in the film’s climax: at a future event, a Chinese general thanks her for calling his private number and repeating the last words of his dying wife, and in the present she uses that knowledge to talk him out of attacking.
The film’s real sting comes in the last scene. Knowing exactly how things will go, Louise chooses to have the child anyway, and to be with Ian, the physicist she worked beside, knowing that Hannah will die young from an incurable illness and that Ian will leave when she tells him she knew. On a second viewing the opening montage isn’t a memory; it’s a decision. The name Hannah is also a palindrome, which reads like a hint about a life that can be read from either end. The film opens and closes on Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” the same piece that appears in Shutter Island, which was Mindblown Monday two weeks ago.