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(Review) DISCLOSURE DAY Turns First Contact into a Crisis of Trust

By. Professor Horror

Steven Spielberg has spent the better part of his career asking us to look up. From the silhouetted figure bathed in light at the end of Close Encounters of the Third King to the bicycle arcing across the moon in E.T. the alien encounter in Spielberg’s cinematic universe has always been less about the alien and more about the human being staring back. Those films asked enormous questions: what does it mean to reach across the incomprehensible distance between species, between worlds, between ways of knowing? What does the existence of aliens say about our own existence? DISCLOSURE DAY, Spielberg’s latest and most politically urgent science fiction film, has something more ambitious in mind than wonder. It wants, finally, to try to answer.

            The film operates on two parallel tracks that gradually, inevitable converge. In one, Josh O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner is a top-level cybersecurity professional employed by Wardex, a sprawling private corporation contracted by the government to suppress, manage, and (as the film makes chillingly clear) exploit any information connected to the existence of non-human life forms. Wardex is essentially the Men in Black if the Men in Black were a publicly traded company with shareholders to please, which is to say they are considerably more frighting. When Daneil goes rogue and becomes a whistleblower (putting both himself and his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) on the run), stealing secrets and a critical artifact alongside Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield and a small band of similarly disillusioned Wardex insiders, he sets in motion a chain of events that Wardex (and its cold menacing leader Noah Scanlon, played with precise reptilian authority by Colin Firth) will do almost anything to stop. The theft is not merely of information, but it is of the possibility of a world that knows the truth about itself.

            In the film’s other storyline, Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild is living a life that doesn’t quite fit. She’s a meteorologist in Kansas city who is competent, loved by her boyfriend, but quietly aware that her life feels like a space that was built for someone else. Then something begins to happen to Margaret that she cannot explain and cannot stop. She starts to know things. Everything, in fact. She can speak languages she has never studied and she can look into a person’s eyes and tell them deeply personal truths about themselves. And then, during an on air weather report, she appears to have a seizure as strange clicks and groans start emerging from her mouth. The broadcast, needless to say, goes a bit viral, so everyone (including Daniel Kellner) see the video, but only Daniel can understand it. And that connection, that terrifying and improbably bridge between two strangers, is what puts both of them squatly in the crosshairs of Scanlon and his band of black-wearing merrymen.

Spielberg's film is hardly the only recent genre work interested in the politics of belief. In Yorgos Lanthimos's BUGONIA, conspiracy theories, corporate power, and competing versions of reality collide in a darkly funny examination of how easily certainty can become its own form of delusion.

What is remarkable about DISCLOSURE DAY (and what will immediately frustrated audiences who came for hard sci-fi) is how fully Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp commit to keeping the extraterrestrial itself at the margins of the frame. The aliens are there, woven into the fabric of the plot in ways that matter enormously, but this is not a film that lingers on them. It does not explore their strangeness or linger over the details of their worlds or biology. The choice is deliberate and it is correct because DISCLOSURE DAY is not actually about whether we are alone in the universe. It is about what we do with each other once we know we are not. The film looks deeply and seriously at what empathy and understanding create between people (a stronger bond, more resilient society) versus what secret and coordinated falsehood destroy. The aliens are the occasion, but humanity is the subject.

The title itself encodes the argument. “Disclosure Day” is the name Hugo and his colleagues give to their goal: the simultaneous release of everything Wardex has spent over 70 years hiding, delivered to the entire world at once, at all at the same moment. Not managed nor parceled out through approved channels. Not softened or contextualized by institutions that have already decided that the public can handle. All of it, to everyone together. The logic behind this is not naïve utopianism, (the film takes seriously the possibility of panic, of destabilization, of bad actors eager to exploit the chaos) but it rests on a conviction that Spielberg has clearly held for a long time: that the experience of receiving enormous world-altering information as a collective is fundamentally different from receiving it as individuals. There is something that happens when human beings encounter the incomprehensible together. Something that overrides the usual fractures and rivalries and fear. The film is sustained argument for that something.

This is where Wardex’s villainy becomes philosophically interesting rather than merely functional. Scanlon and his corporation are not simply trying to protect their secrets because secrets mean power (though that is certainly part of it). They are (more specifically) fighting against the unification of the world. The disclosure they dread is not only the revelation that non-human life exists. It is the revelation of what human beings are capable of when they encounter that fact together, without a corporate intermediary deciding who learns what and when. Wardex has spent decades studying alien technology and working out how to use it for its own ends, and the thing that threatens that project most is not any individual whistleblower. It is the possibility of a world that no longer needs Wardex to interpret reality for it. Firth’s Scanlon understands this with an evil clarity, which is why he is such an effective antagonist: he is not wrong that disclosure changes everything, but he is simply on the wrong side of the change.

The ensemble cast carries all of this with impressive coherence. Blunt is exceptional in the way she always is, which is to say she locates the specific emotional texture of Margaret's transformation (bewilderment shading into something like grief, then into something like purpose) without ever tipping into melodrama. O'Connor brings the kind of quietly feverish intensity he demonstrated in Challengers, and his Daniel is a man who has crossed a line and is running too fast to look back at it. Firth, given what is essentially a villain's role, makes Scanlon disturbingly plausible as he depicts a man who genuinely believes in the necessity of what he does. And Domingo (my favorite), as the insider turned advocate, functions as something close to the film's moral center because he is the person who most clearly articulates what is actually at stake. Notably, no single performance dominates the film, and this feels less like a deficiency than a structural choice that reinforces the film's central argument: we do not need a leader. We need cooperation. We need the thing that happens when everyone acts at once.

What DISCLOSURE DAY finally asks is not whether the truth can set us free, but whether we are capable of receiving it as one. Spielberg has always believed in the human capacity for wonder (it is the engine behind Close Encounters, behind E.T., behind every upturned face he has ever put on screen) but here that belief arrives with something harder attached to it: that wonder is most powerful when it is shared, and most threatening to the people who profit from its absence. It is not a perfect film, but it is an exciting and genuinely thoughtful one, and in 2026 a blockbuster that asks us to consider what we owe each other as a species is not nothing.

If DISCLOSURE DAY treats extraterrestrial life as a catalyst for philosophical questions about humanity's future, MUM, I'M ALIEN PREGNANT takes a considerably messier approach. Check out our review of the Sundance horror-comedy that transforms alien contact into a goo-covered exploration of bodily autonomy, parenthood, and reproductive anxiety.

DISCLOSURE DAY opens in theaters June 12, 2026.