Arrival Review

Arrival is a short film made in 2016 and was directed by Daniel Montanarini. In this film, a woman sits in a café, thinking about how she is pregnant and what she is going to do with the baby. She is anticipating meeting the father. The film is a dramatic monologue, and we hear the thoughts in the woman's head as a voice over from the action we are seeing on the screen. As she thinks about the anticipated meeting, the thoughts she has seem to get more and more worried, building tension for an audience member as well. We are also given more and more fragments of information about the situation as the film goes on, in order to piece together the bigger picture by the end of the film.


In terms of micro elements used, the camera stays in one fixed position throughout the majority of the film, zooming in and out on the woman. This creates a view for the audience that seems to be more like a play, since there is a lack of editing and we are seeing the story play out from one fixed position, and the single camera angle being a wide shot and not really moving. The sound is mainly diegetic, because you can hear the noise of the café at the start, but then her voice over comes in over the top. The sound of a train disrupts the peace of the café and represents how the woman is really feeling in her own head. The sound then goes completely silent after the train, and we only hear the voice over and not the café sounds. This shows how the character has a moment of clarity about what she is going to do.


I enjoyed this films use of sound to represent the characters' emotions, but I didn't really enjoy the monologue style of it. I don't think I will be using that sort of style in my own work, but I liked the idea of it being in one single location, since this gives the idea of the film more simplicity.