Disclosure Day (2026)

A familiar Spielberg return that feels more like repetition than revelation.

Note: My original review was posted on Taste of Cinema, which can be found here. Steven Spielberg returns to our screens in a familiar way, informing us that aliens do indeed exist and, in the case of Disclosure Day, that humans have secretly been abusing these extra-terrestrial beings for nearly 79 years and keeping it a secret from the world. You’d be hard-pressed to claim that the idea is original; it’s not even a new idea from the man’s own filmography. It feels like a personal project in many respects; Spielberg dipping a toe back into his own sci-fi flicks of the seventies. The 79 years also feel very poignant; it just happens to be Spielberg’s age.

This global cover-up has mainly been achieved by a corporation called Wardex, headed by Colin Firth’s Noah, and in the film’s opening sequence, he and his team have just tracked down Josh O’Connor’s Dr. Daniel Kellner, a Wardex whistleblower who has stolen all the files necessary to unleash the companies’ secrets on the world, giving the population the “full disclosure” that the title suggests. He’s constantly receiving instructions on burner phones from his former boss, Colman Domingo’s fellow whistleblower Hugo, all the while on the run with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson).

We then meet Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, a weather reporter with plans of becoming an anchor who, after the appearance in her kitchen of a little red bird, realizes she can suddenly read minds and speak any language she chooses. Following this, while live on air, she begins to make strange and unnerving clicking noises, seemingly a language only she—and as it turns out, Kellner—can understand. The two must surely meet and presumably offer the world the truth.

The most interesting aspect of Disclosure Day is the central conflict between Wardex and the whistleblowers themselves. As soon as Kellner reveals his plan to Jane, the first thought I had was that this is surely a terrible idea. With the world on the brink of World War III, as background news bulletins inform us, would the release of such documents make things far worse and send the world into a blind panic? Spielberg thinks not and, true to form, offers us a well-known path.

This would all be very well, but as Disclosure Day trudges on, you’re reminded more and more of films that have already ventured down this well-trodden path, and not just from Spielberg’s own back catalogue. Jeff Nichols’s underseen Midnight Special (2016) jumped out at me, as perhaps inevitably did Neill Blomkamp’s excellent District 9 (2009), a film that has far more to say than Disclosure Day. While Blomkamp’s film felt like a timely and fascinating allegory about immigration, Spielberg’s world-weary message about countries working together and listening to each other (as well as arguably touching on immigration) feels tired.

The film that perhaps looms largest over Disclosure Day is Denis Villeneuve’s superb Arrival (2016), a film that took the concept of connection and supernatural diplomacy and weaved it into something truly original. The characters and audience were made to work to untangle the film’s mysteries, whereas here, Margaret and Daniel are simply handed their powers through the prism of childhood trauma, a theme that Spielberg has delivered perfectly in the past, but here it feels very forced.

Although Blunt has a blast with Fairchild, when she puts her mind-reading skills into practice towards the end to ensure an escape for her and Daniel, it’s laughable. It’s one scene of many when the jeopardy disappears completely, in the same way a superhero film’s climactic battle between two indestructible people hitting each other often does. Firth, O’Connor, and Domingo are always good value, and they do their best to sink their teeth into material here that’s perfectly solid in principle but is badly lacking in execution.

As for Eve Hewson, her performance is one of the film’s best, yet the early revelation about her character being a former nun has you rolling your eyes at the inevitability of another science versus religion debate, which is always in the background but is never explored beyond the usual surface-level questions. “You never lost your faith in God,” a fellow sister tells her late on. “You lost faith in people.” How many times have we heard a version of that before? It's a lazy assumption that this indeed how the situation would play out if it was real. It's also a film that reasserts, however unwillingly, that people will simply believe what they're told. Spielberg references real life UFO hoaxes and attempts to explain them away within the framework of Disclosure Day, another shoulder slumping revelation that firmly places the film within the territory of Gnosticism. This is a film that once more asks you to believe that empathy is the key to everything, but this is impossible when we finally see Daniel and Margaret forced to revisit their childhood trauma, in which they're abducted by these aliens who forcibly implant something into their left eye, an idea that implies occultism. It's all very unnerving, but we're supposed to feel empathy?

It does feel like a while now since Spielberg has reinvented himself or offered us something truly interesting. You’d arguably have to go all the way back to Munich (2005) for something that sparked serious debate. And although it seems churlish to suggest that one of the cinematic greats needs to prove anything at all, Disclosure Day feels like it takes themes from his own past classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), while touching on more recent and far more ambitious science fiction films, yet somehow offers us nothing new at all. You can view it through a more troubling lens, but even attempting to enjoy it as a blockbuster doesn't work- and that's arguably the most problematic thing of all. ★★ 5.8/10