Disclosure Day review: Spielberg's latest is messy, thoughtful and timely

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day follows a whistleblower and a meteorologist drawn into a race over hidden evidence of alien contact. The film turns that chase into a question about secrecy, truth and whether humanity can bear disclosure.

In Short

• Daniel Kellner flees WARDEX with evidence of long-suppressed extraterrestrial contact
• Emily Blunt's Margaret develops strange abilities linking empathy, fear and revelation
• Colin Firth plays a wary official convinced secrecy protects civilisation

Steven Spielberg has spent much of his career asking cinephiles to look up at the sky with wonder. In Disclosure Day, he asks a far more uncomfortable question: what if the truth finally looked back?

Part conspiracy thriller, part road movie and part first-contact spectacle, Spielberg’s first feature since The Fabelmans is an ambitious meditation on information [rather misinformation], power and humanity’s uneasy relationship with the unknown. It doesn’t always reconcile its competing ideas, but when it works, Disclosure Day feels like a filmmaker still fascinated by what happens when ordinary people collide with extraordinary truths.

The film begins with cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a former employee of a secretive organisation called WARDEX, deciding that the world deserves to know what has been hidden for decades: alien life exists, and evidence of extraterrestrial contact has been systematically suppressed. Pursued by his former boss Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Daniel goes on the run with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), carrying a device capable of exposing everything.

At the same time, thousands of miles away, Kansas meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly develops inexplicable abilities. She can hear thoughts, sense emotions and appears connected to something much larger than herself. Before long, her path collides with Daniel’s, setting off a race against governments, institutions and humanity’s own fears.

The premise sounds like vintage Spielberg territory because, in many ways, it is. There are shades of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, echoes of E.T., traces of Minority Report and even flashes of The Post. Yet Disclosure Day never feels like a greatest-hits compilation. Instead, it functions as a meditation on one of Spielberg’s favourite themes: how ordinary people respond when confronted with something extraordinary.

The film’s greatest strength is that it refuses to treat aliens as the real threat. The extraterrestrials themselves are largely incidental. The true conflict lies in humanity’s reaction to them. Scanlon argues that the public cannot handle the truth. Daniel insists that knowledge belongs to everyone. The film repeatedly returns to that tension, asking whether transparency is always a virtue or whether some information carries consequences too large to predict.

In an era shaped by misinformation, conspiracy theories and endless debates over who controls information, that question feels surprisingly timely.

Josh O’Connor delivers one of the film’s strongest performances. Daniel could easily have become a generic whistleblower archetype, but O’Connor injects him with humour, nervous energy and conviction. Even when the film grows increasingly chaotic, he remains its emotional anchor.

Emily Blunt, however, quietly emerges as the film’s beating heart. Margaret is part prophet, part conspiracy theorist and part bewildered everywoman trying to understand what is happening to her. Blunt balances comedy, vulnerability and determination with remarkable ease. In many ways, she embodies the film’s central idea: that empathy may be humanity’s greatest survival skill.

Colin Firth also makes for an effective antagonist. Rather than playing Scanlon as a cartoon villain, he presents him as a man convinced he is protecting civilisation from itself. That ambiguity gives the conflict genuine weight.

Spielberg, meanwhile, remains one of cinema’s great visual storytellers. The chase sequences are thrilling, the set pieces inventive and the scale appropriately cinematic. Even at nearly 80, he directs with an energy many younger filmmakers would envy. A car-versus-train set piece, several cross-country pursuits and moments of genuine wonder remind us why Spielberg remains one of blockbuster cinema’s defining architects.

Yet Disclosure Day is not without its flaws. For all its fascinating ideas, the screenplay occasionally struggles to decide what kind of film it wants to be. Is it a paranoid conspiracy thriller? A first-contact science-fiction story? A road movie? A meditation on collective empathy? The answer is often all of them at once.

That ambition is admirable, but it also creates a certain unevenness. The pacing, too, occasionally works against the film. At nearly 145 minutes, there are stretches where the narrative feels as though it is circling its ideas rather than advancing them. Spielberg’s curiosity remains infectious, but the film could have benefited from greater restraint.

The final act occasionally leans too heavily into sentimentality, and some of its most intriguing philosophical questions are brushed aside in favour of spectacle. Spielberg appears caught between his instinct for hopeful humanism and a more cynical view of modern society. The result is a conclusion that feels heartfelt, if slightly less powerful than the ideas that precede it.

Yet Disclosure Day is at its best when it stops asking whether aliens exist and starts asking what humanity would do with that knowledge.

The answers it offers are sometimes messy, and not always convincing. But the question remains compelling. At a time when information is weaponised, truth is contested and empathy often feels in short supply, Spielberg delivers a blockbuster that dares to wonder whether human beings are emotionally prepared for ultimate disclosure.

It may not possess the emotional clarity of his finest work, but Disclosure Day remains an engrossing reminder of why Spielberg continues to matter.

Disclosure Day releases in India on June 12.

- Ends