Amongst linguists, Arrival is beloved for essentially everything except that one single element haha. Except for the linguistic relativism, it's actually an extremely accurate depiction of what linguistics work looks like. Of course, it is still a sci-fi movie and so it needs a little magic as well, and I won't begrudge it for that.
I'm not surprised about your medical friends though. Because everyone speaks a language, they people often thing that this makes them qualified to speak on linguistics, especially smart people.
I don't want to entirely overstate this though. For instance, if you present people with two shapes, one with a bunch of spikes and the other a more softer blob-like thing, tell them that one of them is called a bouba and one is called a kiki, and ask them to guess which is which, the vast majority of people with call the spikey one the kiki and the blobby one the bouba. So there are some curious inherent effects that language has on our perceptions, but they're subtle, and absolutely nothing like "you cannot imagine the mere concept of disobedience because you don't have a word for it".
JustZ