DENIS VILLENEUVE’s spellbinding first-contact mystery, “Arrival”, has a simple but ingenious design idea: it tips the flying saucers on their side. Like the alien spacecraft in “Independence Day”, they have city-sized diameters, but they are also standing on end, which makes them resemble giant surfboards or mountainous Pringles crisps rather than standard UFOs. The repositioning is appropriate, because “Arrival”, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, tips alien-invasion movies on their side, too. The question it asks isn’t, “How do we stop the extra-terrestrials destroying us,” but “How do we know whether they want to destroy us or not?” It wasn’t a question that the bug-eyed monsters in “Independence Day” left unanswered for long. Mr Villeneuve views the aliens’ introduction from a similarly unconventional angle. There are television news reports about 12 vast obelisks floating silently over different countries around the globe, but rather than showing us the reports, “Arrival” shows us the face of a linguistics professor, Dr Louise Banks (a typically plucky yet vulnerable Amy Adams) as she watches these reports in her university lecture theatre. The professor lives a spartan, lonely life, her only company being memories of a daughter who died of cancer. But she once translated a secret message for the American government, so when the aliens attempt to communicate with us earthlings, a gruff Colonel (Forest Whitaker) comes to her for help. In partnership with a gung-ho physicist (Jeremy Renner), she has to venture aboard a ship which is hanging just over a Montana plain, and talk to the aliens which are lurking inside. Her preparations are a masterclass in anticipation-building. By the time we actually see two of the aliens through a smoky white screen, we’re almost as anxious as Louise is.

Face to face with the creatures—well not face to face, exactly—she realises that she’ll never decipher their spoken language of clicks and moans: perhaps the Colonel should have brought in a dolphin instead. But she can have a crack at their written vocabulary. Looking something like seven-armed octopi, the visitors write by spraying splotchy circles of ink into their liquid atmosphere. Again, it’s a terrific visual concept, which is destined to feature on thousands of T-shirts and posters, although I wonder if one of the film’s designers glanced at the coffee-cup stains on their desk and thought, “Wait a minute ...” At any rate, it’s up to Louise to work out what those circles might mean.

It’s a refreshingly small-scale mission. “Arrival” keeps reminding us that the world’s leaders are getting antsy, and that certain American soldiers believe that interplanetary diplomacy would be aided by a well-aimed bazooka, but at its heart it is a reflective, play-like drama set in a makeshift military compound. With a taut screenplay by Eric Heisserer, adapted from a short shory by Ted Chiang, its main theme is the difficulties of communication. Specifically, it muses on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that each language encodes unique habits of thought, and to speak to people with a different language is to struggle to overcome those habits. “Independence Day” didn’t mention any of that.

That fact that Mr Villeneuve can wring so much pathos and awe from this theory is a sign of how skilful he is. Judging by his recent hits, “Prisoners”, “Enemy” and “Sicario”, the Quebecois director seems to be working his way through various mainstream Hollywood genres (and various nouns) and giving them each an eerie, muted new coat of paint. But his intimate yet mind-expanding new film should propel him to another level of prestige—just in time for the “Blade Runner” sequel he is now shooting—so “Arrival” is the perfect title in more ways than one. The film also has the best kind of twist: one that is almost impossible to predict, but which is hinted at all along, and which takes everything you’ve just seen and, yes, tips it on its side.