Tongue twister

Arrival is a big budget sci-fi film with a smaller, more pensive, cleverer film trying to get out, which has to be an improvement on a dumb film with an even dumber film trying to get out, as in the manner of Interstellar, say. So we have that to be thankful for, at least.

The film stars Amy Adams, who appears to be everywhere these days. (Check your sock drawer and under the bed; you never know.) She plays Dr Louise Banks, a university linguist who lives in a beautiful, modernist lakeside house, as any academic in any American film always does. (Do such houses come with tenure?) As we see right at the start, she is mourning the death of her daughter. You are not meant to understand how this figures until the ‘twist’ in the film’s final moment, which has been much applauded by other critics, although I have to say I saw it coming a mile off, if not ten miles off.