The Arrival Of Wang (DVD)

Starring: Ennio Fantastichini, Francesca Cuttica, Juliet Esey Joseph
Director: Antonio Manetti, Marco Manetti
Running Time: 80 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: November 12th 2012

As The Arrival Of Wang is being brought out by an imprint of LGBT specialist distributor Peccadillo Pictures, you could be forgiven for thinking the title refers to something far saucier that what this film actually is. However Saffron Hill Films has been set up to handle their genre titles, with this one being a sci-fi thriller from Italy.

Gaia (Francesca Cuttica) is a translator who’s called out of the blue to take a rush job. Before she knows it she’s in the back of a car being blindfolded so that she doesn’t know where they’re going. She’s taken to a room where she’s told she’ll have to translate from Mandarin into English. Initially she’s not allowed to see the speaker, but when they eventually agree to switch the lights on, she finds an alien sitting opposite to her, tied to a chair.

The authorities want to know why the creature is in Rome and what his intentions are. The alien, who’s given the nickname Mr. Wang, say his intentions are purely peaceful, and that his race only recently discovered the Earth was full of life, so he’s been sent to make first contact with the population. No matter what the alien says, his human interrogator (Ennio Fantastichini) seems unconvinced. Wang is asked the same questions over and over, with the pressure being upped until it reaches the point of torture. The authorities seem certain Wang has an ulterior motive, but is the creature as innocent as he suggests?

The Arrival Of Wang is an intriguing movie that certainly gets you thinking. Is the alien innocent or guilty? Are the authorities right to be so suspicious? Is it better they resort to torture just in case, when so much is potentially at stake? Should Gaia be so trusting of the creature or should she assume that just because the authorities aren’t telling her everything, that doesn’t mean they don’t know more about what’s happening? It’s all very intriguing, and while it has some flaws, The Arrival Of Wang is surprisingly absorbing.

I did have a few issues, many of which surround the use of translation in the movie. Although the idea Wang would have learnt Mandarin rather than Italian as more people on the planet speak it as a first language than anything else, you can’t help but think that if this visitor is smart enough to travel light years across space, he might have worked out what language he’d need to use in Italy. It also means that much of the movie is someone saying something in Italian, Gaia translating it into Mandarin, waiting for an answer and translating it back. By the middle of the movie it really starts to slow things down and gets in the way of the momentum of the film.

However it’s a bit of a necessary evil so that Gaia is pulled right into heart of the situation. She becomes the moral compass of the movie, pulling the audience towards being shocked at the treatment of this visitor to our planet, especially compared to the shouty, aggressive posture of the interrogator. The ending is likely to divide audiences, with some loving its shift of the story, while others will feel they’ve been deliberately hoodwinked. I certainly thought it worked, as it helps ensure you’ll keep thinking about it after the credits close.

The whole thing is very intriguing and unusual for being a sci-fi movie with a CG main character, but told on such a small scale – most of the movie takes place in a single room. It is pretty much a single-location, three-hander thriller, but it just so happens that one of those three is an alien. By the end you may be wondering what the ‘point’ of the movie was, but that in itself is pretty much the point, to get you questioning your assumptions about everything from the need for intense interrogation to whether it’s better to be suspicious or trusting.

Overall Verdict: An intriguing sci-fi flick that’ll get you thinking. Although it has its flaws, putting an alien in a room with two humans and pumping him for information turns out to be more engrossing and thought provoking than you might expect.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac