Filming Missing Bodies: ‘Bodiless-Character Films’ and the Presence of Absence in Denis Villeneuve’s Cinema

This chapter explores the function of absence aesthetics in four of Denis Villeneuve’s feature films – Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), Incendies (2010) and Arrival (2016) – by analysing tropes of motherhood, surrogacy and artefactualisation. The author shows how, for Villeneuve’s protagonists, pregnancy is represented as alienating, while also projecting future hope through the womb as liminal space for the missing fantasy object. The surrogate, on the other hand, stands in for the missing object, but serves only to underscore its absence. Finally, certain objects in the four films become artefactualised through their association with a missing, irretrievable past.