Spoiler alert: the White House does not get blown up in Arrival.

But if you’re yearning for a smart, thoughtful sci-fi film that wonders how first contact with aliens might go down, this tight little gem of a film is a gift from beyond the stars.

Making its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week before opening in wide release in November, Arrival feels a bit like a blend of Contact, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and perhaps Gravity, for its strong but emotionally scarred heroine facing what feels like an impossible challenge.

When 12 mysterious alien spaceships arrive on earth, positioned at seemingly random points around the globe, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and theoretical physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are recruited by a U.S. army intelligence colonel (Forest Whitaker.) Their goal: find a way to communicate with the aliens on the giant, oblong-shaped ship hovering above rural Montana, and figure out what they want.

Through setbacks large and small, Banks tries to learn the aliens’ language, consisting of smoky, circular swirls that have no human equivalent. The halting conversations with the extra-terrestrials – who look like giant disembodied hands with the DNA of spider crabs – make for some truly tense moments. If Rosetta Stone lessons were this compelling, we’d all be speaking 20 languages by now.

Adams is amazing as an academic way out of her depth, thrust into a life-altering situation while coping with memories of her daughter, lost to a rare form of cancer. Renner doesn’t really have much to do here – in a lesser film, the characters’ sexes might have been swapped, with Connelly being the plucky female sidekick – but that’s OK, because Adams carries things with graceful ease.

The gut-wrenching tension mixed with quiet emotion that made Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario so fantastic is on display in Arrival as well, although this is ultimately a more accessible, uplifting film. That said, once the wow factor of the aliens and their odd lingo wears off, it settles into some familiar plot beats and loses a bit of momentum, before pulling out a thought-provoking and heartstring-tugging revelation near the end.

Arrival leaves a couple of loose threads untied – it’s one of those rare movies that feels like it could be 20 or 30 minutes longer, rather than shorter – and some of its plot turns don’t hold up well to scrutiny. But it’s an intelligent, emotionally rich bit of storytelling that makes landmark-disintegrating alien invaders look even dumber than before.

STilley@postmedia.com

@stevetilley