ou’ve seen flying saucers descend on planet Earth many times before, but none quite like the ones in Arrival. Near the start of Denis Villeneuve’s new film, adapted by Eric Heisserer from the Ted Chiang short story Story of your Life, a dozen vast, inexplicable, charcoal-grey wedges drop from the sky and hang above seemingly random points around our planet.

Depending on the angle, they look variously like monoliths, moons and enormous Terry’s Chocolate Orange segments. But without an easily identifiable cockpit, engine, wings or jets, they seem less practical than symbolic, like skywritten letters from an unknown alphabet. The question isn’t what they are. It’s what they mean.

Their conduct doesn’t offer any hints. As Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker), the US Army officer charged with investigating the wedge above rural Montana, drily observes: “if they’re scientists, they aren’t asking many questions.”

Instead, those come from expert linguist Louise Banks (a superb, solemn Amy Adams), who’s enlisted by Weber to communicate with whatever’s inside. The endgame is asking them what Weber describes as “the big question” (and isn't it just): what is their purpose on Earth?

Along with mathematician Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), Louise is airlifted to the Montana wedge, where access to an antechamber in the ship opens every 12 hours. Villeneuve’s camera tracks the helicopter as it passes over what looks like a music festival – camper vans, cars, tents and clusters of people who’ve come to see the wedge in person – before it lands on a deserted grassy plain, while mist spills over the mountains that flank the site.

The gaunt score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who also soundtracked Villeneuve’s drug-cartel thriller Sicario, is little more than a chest-tightening bass note – think scraped piano wire – and a half-sung, half-blown melody line that seems to exist outside of any earthly time signature. It makes the Close Encounters of the Third Kind musical motif sound like the Macarena: as for Independence Day, even Will Smith in his mid-90s pomp would think twice about pressing on.

But press on is what Louise does, while Villeneuve vividly conjures a sense of sickening, multi-tiered panic around her. On one level, there’s the immediate potential threat to her personal wellbeing; on another, the growing global unease that blares from TV news screens around the military camp, which fuels the feeling – both vivid and wrenchingly timely – that the world as we know it is in the early, slow-motion stages of disintegration.

In a series of meetings with the wedge’s inhabitants – rapturously eerie Lovecraftian crab-elephants, with legs like witches’ fingers – Louise teaches them rudimentary English while they respond in their own written language, which looks at first coffee-mug rings but slowly takes on sense and shape.

These confrontations, captured with brooding, low-key dazzle by the brilliant cinematographer Bradford Young, are the best and creepiest scenes Villeneuve has yet shot, which fans of his earlier work will know is really saying something. They’re meditations on anxious human faces – lit from below, framed by reflective visors and orange hazard suits, against backgrounds of empty grey or billowing white.