Sicario and Arrival - Denis Villeneuve's masterpieces

In honour of the upcoming Dune (my most anticipated film of the whole year), I decided to go back and look at the previous two films of Dune’s director, Denis Villeneuve. This guy has gone on from his humble Montréal origins to directing many of the decade’s most iconic films, including Prisoners, Incendies, Enemy, Blade Runner 2049, and of course, Arrival and Sicario. And ever since I watched and marvelled at Arrival, I’ve been very intrigued by Villeneuve’s career, and how he directs a film.

I’m choosing to review Sicario and Arrival because they’re very different in subject matter, but similar in tone and directorial style to one another, and also because I absolutely love these films. I have also seen Blade Runner 2049, but I have mixed feelings on that one and the original Blade Runner, because those are challenging, slow, ginormously-scoped films that I don’t quite get yet (as the BBC’s Mark Kermode once said, maybe “at the time I just wasn’t good enough for it” as a film-watcher). So let’s focus on the two that I know well and love.

So Sicario, for those who haven’t seen it, is about a CIA agent (Emily Blunt) roped into a Mexican drug cartel sting by two suspicious agents who clearly have ulterior motives, while Arrival follows Amy Adams as a linguistics professor who is recruited to help communicate with a race of aliens who have just landed on Earth. Both movies are significantly different in key themes and premises, but share multiple noticeable trends in Villeneuve’s career – the process of recruitment, government inefficiency, slow-paced build-up, ultra-wide shots, and an underlying river of tension flowing throughout.

The two movies effectively demonstrate an artist in complete control of his craft. There is a clear identity to the shots and the structure and the individual elements of the film that many other filmmakers just can’t pull off, and it’s admirable to see.

What both movies particularly master is tension. Rather than use the typical directorial tactics of relentless close-ups to try and hide information from the audience, Villeneuve frames many of his scenes in ultra-wide landscape shots. The sights of the barren fields which hold great mystery and untold violence unsettles the viewer, whether the scene is photographing a regular suburban house or an alien spaceship. Mystery and intrigue runs thickly through both Sicario and Arrival, and is emphasised by this technique.

Additionally, Villeneuve uses music very minimally in both films – although scored by Oscar-nominee Jóhann Jóhannsson (R.I.P.), it’s limited to some ambience and some minorly intense music in Sicario’s arrival in Mexico. Outside of this, the sound design of both films is mostly diegetic – the rustling of clothes, the cocking of guns, the orchestral moan of Arrival’s monsters. There’s never a sense that the feeling of tension from the film is artificial or manipulative, as the sound and sights onscreen are entirely from our perception and imagination.

All of this tension is meaningless without a reasonable protagonist, and in both films, Villeneuve nails how to make a compelling lead character – one who doesn’t make irrational, emotional decisions, but has a sense of clear professionalism and a number of character foils to make them stand out more. It of course helps that these protagonists are played by Emily Blunt and Amy Adams respectively, but Villeneuve ensures that these characters come off as real working people without entirely skimping on the human side. This is probably the reason I didn’t like Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 that much – Ryan Gosling’s silent lead had really nothing to do, and didn’t have a character foil.

In Sicario and Arrival, the compelling nature of the protagonists is exemplified by their reactions to their counterfoils. Neither film contains a clear human antagonist, rather characters that take a significantly more drastic approach, and so the films always retains a sense of believable grey area when it comes to thematic depth. The question isn’t “when will Emily Blunt shoot that evil Benicio del Toro?”, it’s “why should Emily Blunt shoot someone who gets results in a different, drastic way?”, and that provokes much more wonderment from the audience than a black-and-white good vs. evil scenario.

Villeneuve also makes damn beautiful films, both from a visual and a story perspective. From a cinematography standpoint, Villeneuve (and either Roger Deakins or Bradford Young on Sicario and Arrival, respectively) not only uses ultra-wides for mystery and intensity, but as a demonstration of the natural beauty of Arrival’s spaceships, or the inherent darkness of Sicario’s backroads and tunnels. It’s never just a shot-reverse-shot scene with little style, but a constant display of either beauty or brutality.

Story-wise, Villeneuve doesn’t ever struggle with the greater themes of his work. You could list all of the themes of Sicario and Arrival – government fallacy, linguistic barriers, the fear of professional vs personal life, the danger of future knowledge, the necessity of violence, or civilisation’s construction – and be absolutely bowled over by their complexity. But dear ol’ Denis never has to explicitly refer to any of this, because he integrates them into narratives so well that the audience never feels cheated or condescended to. Our only focus is on the brilliance of on-screen events, never the themes behind it, until we realise how well Villeneuve has made all of it consumable.

My final verdict? I recommend that you go see both of these movies immediately, as well as other Villeneuve pictures and most definitely the upcoming Dune. He’s a celebratory filmmaker with a powerful ambition. Let’s keep him that way.

Anyway, what did you guys think? Leave your answers in the comments below.