In the following pages I will explore the function of absence aesthetics in four of Villeneuve’s films: Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), Incendies (2010), and Arrival (2016). In order to conduct this investigation, I will frame my focus through Christian Metz’s discussion of absence in narrative fiction films, and the ‘bodiless-character films’ theory of Odeya Kohen Raz and Sandra Meiri. For Kohen Raz and Meiri, bodiless-character films are defined by three characteristics: ‘(1) the absence of actors and objects from the spectator’s space; (2) the role of seeing in spectatorship vis-à-vis this absence; and (3) cinema’s ability to embellish its imaginary objects, the latter playing the role of fantasy objects’ (63). They employ this theory in films whose characters are always already missing, and it is their status as a ‘missing person’ that propels the film’s narrative forward. By denying the sight of the object missing (here, the character), the films ‘frustra[te] the spectator’s desire to see’, without a grand reveal of the person who has been missing at the films’ end (Kohen Raz and Meiri 63). The loss of the missing person is permanent. For Kohen Raz and Meiri, this is the case in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), but also true in films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), where the missing person that starts the film gets discarded, never to be found.

Some of Villeneuve’s narratives – such as Prisoners (2013), Incendies, and in a different manner, Sicario (2015) – are about recovering bodies, but mostly they are an exploration of the feelings of loss. Structured through absence, the films focus on the characters’ changing relationship to their surroundings, to their environments, and, most importantly, to their bodies. To begin this analysis, I will explore Metz’s idea of good cinematic objects that inspire, upon viewing them, a viewer’s fantasy. These good cinematic objects will heretofore be called fantasy objects, and they play a significant role in the function of absence aesthetics. Then, I will describe three main features of absence aesthetics: cyclical metonymies, the disruption of linear narrative structure, and the emotional and social isolation of the films’ main (female) characters.