On the one hand, the screen-sphere promotes greater interactivity between users, technology, and other people. Yet on the other hand (to use a carefully chosen metaphor), the screen-sphere is tinged with concerns that despite fostering enhanced connectivity in virtual space, we may be losing touch with the material ground of identity and intersubjective communication. In this essay, I put Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language and intersubjective experience in dialogue with Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). As Sobchack describes, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is a sustained investigation into “the sensuous contours of language, with meaning and its signification born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the fleshly dialogue, of human beings and the world together making sense sensible” (Address 3). In the first section of this essay, I gloss Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language, in particular his claims that our capacity for intersubjective communication through speech and gesture is always grounded in the lived experience of the perceptive and expressive body. Then, I test Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thought in a handling of the “sensuous contours of language” as they are expressed in—and mediated through—Villeneuve’s Arrival. I suggest that the film is not only narratively about (mis)communication between human and alien forms of language, but further, I argue that Arrival is self-reflexive of film as a sensuous event. The multiplicity of screens in its mise-en-scène not only provides a vivid illustration of the screen-sphere, but also, through Arrival’s appeal to the sensorium, it serves as a vital reminder that film language necessitates an intersubjective and embodied “fleshly dialogue” between the spectator and the screen.