Nonlinear Storytelling With Arrival

What Nonlinear Storytelling Actually Does

Anyone else watch Project Hail Mary (2026) this weekend? It's a big blockbuster of a good time with a charming lead and one of my favorite creative teams, Drew Goddard, Andy Weir, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, behind the camera. I had not read the book and tried to avoid as any spoiler-filled trailers as possible, so I was surprised the story quietly hinged on nonlinear storytelling. 

Nonlinear storytelling is when a screenplay presents the events of the story in a way other than chronological order. So instead of:

A → B → C

You might get:

C → B → A

or

A → B → A

or any of the other infinite ways that a story's scenes may go together. 

The key is that the audience is receiving the information out of order. Having a story presented out of order can be confusing for the audience unless it lends itself to the basis of the story or plot so it's a screenwriting tool that is frequently deployed within the science fiction genre. At its core, nonlinear storytelling is withholding context from the audience to show effect before cause. It's most commonly used as a flashback or the classic: 

*record scratch* I bet you're wondering how I got here.

But it's best used to reflect how characters experience time, whether it’s fragmented, simultaneous or already determined. Instead of asking what happens next, it engages the audience to ask: what actually happened? Lets look at three examples that show how nonlinear storytelling is used to control perspective, tension and payoff in the criminally under read Arrival (2016).

The Flashback That Isn’t a Flashback

Louise Banks is a linguist recruited to communicate with an alien species to determine their intentions. As she learns their complex language, she begins to experience visions of her daughter. In the first three pages of the script, Louise reflects on memory and time while at her lake house. 

She recalls moments of her daughter's life from birth to teenage conflict. The sequence culminates in the death of her daughter from an illness, which destroys Louise. Her voice over ends with her hinting that her experience of time does not work the way she once believed. 

This is where the script starts fooling you. As a reader, you're led by the writer Eric Heisserer to believe that Louise's experience of time is altered from the trauma of losing her child. It's structured as a sequence of events in flashback but you'll notice that there is no (FLASHBACK) in the script slug. Heisserer isn't lying but the reader mislabels it because of familiar storytelling language. In the end, the events of the film actually give a totally different and surprising context to the scenes of Louise's life with her daughter. 

Time Starts Leaking Into the Present

As Louise learns the heptapod language, she experiences the increasing flashes of Hannah. Exhausted and shaken, Louise sits alone after the confrontation, mirroring a familiar gesture as she runs her fingers through her hair. That action triggers a shift in time, cutting to a moment with her daughter Hannah at age twelve standing in the doorway of Louise’s study.

The transition visually links past and present through an identical behavior. It blends timelines without signaling a clear boundary. Notice how these flashes are triggered by a cognitive change. It isn't presented as a memory with Louise staring off, "remembering". These flashes are an example of the nonlinear storytelling being tied to a character's perspective.

Each flash is triggered by Louise's mental state and often bridged by overlapping voiceover. The repetition trains the reader to accept the pattern so that the twist hides in plain site. So the script successfully communicates the events unfolding while hiding the twist behind common screenwriting conventions.

The Choice That Was Always Coming

In the climax of the film, Louise calls General Shang and uses his wife’s dying words, words she hasn’t learned yet, to convince him to stand down from launching an attack. The line reframes the conflict, emphasizing that war only creates loss not victory. In doing so, the scene becomes both a turning point in the story and the clearest example of nonlinear storytelling where knowledge from the future drives action in the present. Information from the future drives action in the present. 

Check it out on page 113 of the script if you would like to read it yourself. But the thing I want to shine a light on for this is the final three pages and how nonlinear storytelling is used to advance character. 

This is where the script stops being clever and starts being devastating. The Louise voiceover reveals that the story isn't just about the struggle to communicate with first contact. It's a personal story being told from a mother to her daughter. The events become the way Louise explains how she came to understand time, choice and what their life together would be. 

We then see the same scenes from the opening. We see the writing on the glass "Do you want to make a baby?". We see flashes of Hannah as a newborn, a four year old and twelve year old. Each of these are told from a slightly different perspective sometimes lingering longer than in the first three pages. 

And then the writer Eric Heisserer shows us that Hannah still dies. That, for Louise, the knowledge of the future didn't change the future. What's really happening is Louise choosing to bring Hannah into the world knowing exactly how her story ends. That's what linear storytelling unlocks at its best. It's not just a different way to structure time in your script, but a deeper way to reveal character.