Rating: 8/10
Director: Steven Spielberg | Screenplay: David Koepp, from a story by Spielberg | Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo, Wyatt Russell | Cinematography: Janusz Kamiński | Music: John Williams | Runtime: 145 min | Rated: PG-13
There is a particular feeling that Steven Spielberg's best films produce, and it has nothing to do with spectacle for its own sake. It is the feeling of looking up. Of a night sky that is suddenly not empty. Anyone who grew up on Close Encounters of the Third Kind or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial knows exactly what that sensation is, and how rarely modern blockbusters bother to reach for it.
Disclosure Day reaches for it, and gets there.
Spielberg's new science-fiction thriller, his first return to extraterrestrial territory in two decades, is built around a decades-long cover-up: proof of alien contact, buried by a shadow agency operating outside government oversight, and the small, stubborn group of people determined to drag that truth into daylight. Josh O'Connor plays Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity specialist who decides to blow the whistle on his employer. Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City TV meteorologist whose life detonates on live air when she begins speaking in tongues she has never learned, and discovers she can hear what the people around her are thinking. The two have never met. They are, nevertheless, connected.
Spielberg is back, and he is not coasting
The most striking thing about Disclosure Day is how confident it feels. At 79, Spielberg is still directing like a man with something to prove, and he stages this film with the muscularity of his Indiana Jones years. A high-speed train sequence in the second act is genuinely as good as anything in his action filmography.
But the real craft is in the light. Shot largely on 35mm by longtime collaborator Janusz Kamiński, the film treats light as an active character: beams cutting through smoke at impossible angles, headlights swallowing a highway, a single fixture reframing a face mid-sentence. In one quietly brilliant shot, Margaret's reflection appears in the back of a security guard's shaved head as she reads his mind. She is, quite literally, inside it. These are not throwaway flourishes. They are a filmmaker who still thinks of cinema as a magic trick, and who still knows how to perform one.
John Williams's score, his thirtieth collaboration with Spielberg, does the rest. It is a reminder of how much of the "Spielberg feeling" was always in the orchestra.
Emily Blunt's career-best work
Blunt has been very good for a very long time. She has never been this good.
Margaret Fairchild is a difficult role: a completely ordinary woman handed a cosmic burden she is unqualified to carry, whose sanity is the first casualty of her gift. Blunt plays the on-air breakdown with a rawness that is genuinely uncomfortable to watch, then spends the rest of the film assembling a person back out of the wreckage. She is best known as a tough, sardonic screen presence; here she works almost entirely in an earnest emotional register, and it lands. It is the kind of performance that gets remembered at the end of the year, and it deserves to be.
She is not alone. Colin Firth, cast firmly against type as Wardex chief Noah Scanlon, gives the film its most unsettling work, a villain who is convinced, all the way down, that he is protecting his country. Firth plays him with anguish rather than menace, which is far more frightening. O'Connor grounds the conspiracy plot with an exhausted, everyman decency, and Colman Domingo and Eve Hewson make the most of supporting roles that could easily have been functional.
Where it strains
Disclosure Day is not flawless. Koepp's screenplay is carrying two genres at once, paranoid conspiracy thriller and cosmic-wonder fable, and the seams occasionally show, particularly in a middle stretch where the plotting outpaces the emotion. Viewers looking for the poetic restraint of Close Encounters will find this a louder, busier film. Some critics have argued that the alien design leans too heavily on 1977 iconography, and that the "cover-up revealed" premise arrives a few years behind the cultural conversation. Both criticisms are fair.
They also did not diminish the experience much for me, because the film's ambitions are ultimately emotional rather than topical.
The ending
We need to talk about the ending, and this is not the place to do it, because it should be experienced cold. What can be said is that Spielberg and Koepp refuse the tidy resolution the genre usually demands. The final scene reframes everything that precedes it, and it will send audiences into the parking lot arguing. That is not a bug. It is the point.
The verdict
Disclosure Day is a reminder of what a Spielberg film can still do: fill a large room with strangers and make all of them look up at the same time. It is imperfect, occasionally overstuffed, and anchored by a performance from Emily Blunt that is worth the ticket on its own.
See it in a theatre. See it on the biggest screen you can find. This is not a film that survives a phone.
8/10