As someone who speaks two languages on a daily basis — even if it's just to myself — I've often felt that parts of my personality can only be expressed in one or the other. For example, when I get mad, it all comes out in French. (It's a much better language for cursing, merde!) Pop culture, especially anything Kardashian-related, gets the English treatment. Anything I learned before college, like math or history — all French. Dreams are divided in a similar way: Anything emotional or absurd is en francais; work-related nightmares are in English.

I'm funnier in French. I also like to believe that I can sing on key in French, if not in English. (A fact my friends have vehemently denied, but whatever.) Some people have Monday brain. I have Frenglish brain.

Story of Your Life, the short story by Ted Chiang on which Arrival is based, is about this very idea. In linguistics, it's known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or as Chiang puts it in the film's production notes "the idea that the language you speak determines how you perceive the world and even what kinds of thoughts you can have." Translation (yes, a linguistics pun — forgive me): If you speak English, your brain interprets things a certain way. If you start speaking an alien language, your brain might start to flashback to the death of your daughter who hasn't been born yet.

This film isn't perfect — the international crisis caused by the aliens' arrival is a little too on the nose, as is Louise's last minute save-the-day interaction with the Chinese foreign minister. But the big reveal totally got me. In these days of constant spoilers and Reddit threads, it's rare to get a true "aha" moment anymore. Maybe that's why at the end of the nearly two-hour run time, I felt almost woozy, as if I'd just had an extreme brain workout.

I left the theater feeling as though I had been truly understood — no small feat for a film about tentacled extraterrestrial blobs — and that, perhaps, is why Adams' snub feels all the more disappointing. It was all thanks to her.