FILM OF THE WEEK: Disclosure Day - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day begins with wrestling - or, as I like to call it, Drag Race for straight men. In a packed arena throbbing with noise, sweat, performance and aggressively enthusiastic belief, costumed bodies are hurled around in a spectacle everyone knows is choreographed and yet responds to as if it were truth. It is a perfect opening image for a film about conspiracy, revelation and our increasingly unstable relationship with reality: a world where swathes of people want fiction to be true, where others insist truth itself is fiction, and where the line between spectacle, evidence, faith and manipulation has become dangerously porous.

It is also one hell of an intro. The camera is restless from the start - veering, circling, pursuing, rarely allowing the film or the audience to settle - as cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) attempts a desperate hand-off while being hunted by Wardex, a shadowy private agency that has spent decades suppressing proof of extraterrestrial life. Somewhere else in America, Kansas City weather presenter Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) finds her life violently rearranged when a strange encounter leaves her able to speak languages she has never learned, read the emotional lives of strangers, and communicate in a series of alien clicks that only Daniel can understand. From there, Disclosure Day becomes a propulsive chase thriller, a theological thought experiment, a whistleblower drama, a late-career Spielberg self-interrogation and - not always elegantly - a plea for empathy in an age that has become pathologically hostile to it.

The world Spielberg shows us is in decay. News bulletins mutter constantly about global tensions, nuclear threats and political brinkmanship. The atmosphere is one of permanent emergency, so far, so depressingly familiar. Into this comes the possibility of the ultimate disclosure, about Earth’s relationship with extra-terrestrial life. Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this film (though they can have a field trip with anything these days), but Spielberg’s focus is more on what it would mean if the truth arrived into a world no longer equipped to receive it. What would we do with the truth now, in an anti-truth age? Would we even recognise it? Would revelation unite us, or would it simply become more content, more evidence to be disputed, memed, monetised, weaponised?

The result is fascinating, thrilling, but sometimes frustrating. The action is superb, with car chases, narrow escapes, sudden jolts of violence and movement. But the film can also feel overburdened by its own ideas. Exposition is occasionally wedged between chase sequences; Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, the Wardex boss determined to keep the truth contained, and his alien stone/mind-control thread is by far the most repetitive and least interesting part of the film. For all the velocity, Disclosure Day might have benefited from more stillness to let its questions breathe rather than pile up.

When the film works, it really works. Emily Blunt is tremendous as Margaret, giving a performance of humour, brilliantly mounting panic and psychic overwhelm. O’Connor, meanwhile, brings a nervous intensity to Daniel, though his relationship with Jane (Eve Hewson), his ex-novitiate girlfriend, is underwritten. There is no chemistry between them, and Jane feels less like a fully developed person than a way for the film to raise theological questions. Those questions are compelling, and a nun mentor figure provides some of the film’s most unexpected and beautiful answers, but like many of the film’s ideas, the religious and philosophical threads glimmer, before being pulled back into the machinery of the thriller.

There are echoes of Arrival here too, particularly in the suggestion that humanity’s survival depends on collaboration across borders, disciplines and forms of knowledge. Daniel and Margaret’s gifts are pointedly different: his rooted in maths, systems and technology; hers in empathy and embodied communication. The film’s argument is that we need both. Colman Domingo, as Wardex defector Hugo Wakefield, delivers this thesis in a speech about empathy as an evolutionary necessity that is undeniably preachy but also beautiful. It feels like Spielberg turning to our current egomaniac tech overlords and saying: "intelligence is not enough, innovation is not enough. You have to care about other people."

For all of Disclosure Day’s action, conspiracies, gadgets and global stakes, it's really about communication between species, nations, science and faith, and between traumatised adults and the children they once were. A late flashback to Margaret’s childhood is heavy on symbolism and light on explanation, and the film is oddly uninterested in clarifying why she and Daniel, specifically, have been chosen. But a sequence in which Margaret is guided through a recreation of her childhood home - a set built to retrieve memory - is rich in a way that feels deliberately meta. Spielberg is reminding us that film itself is a machine for returning us to childhood, imagination, fear and wonder. A set can be fake and still reveal something true. Fiction can connect us to memory, empathy and possibility, but it becomes dangerous when masquerading as evidence, or used to tear the world further apart.

Disclosure Day does not answer all the questions it raises, and at times they feel cobbled together rather than coherently developed. It is less nuanced than Arrival, less transcendent than Close Encounters, and less cleanly constructed than Spielberg at his very best. But it is also generous, sincere, exciting and alive with moral curiosity. In a blockbuster landscape often dominated by franchise maintenance and defensive cynicism, there is something stirring about watching Spielberg still ask enormous, unfashionable questions: What do we owe each other? What truths can we bear? Can wonder survive contact with a world as frightened and divided as ours?

The final word of the film holds its message, and it may be earnest, but it’s needed. Disclosure Day may be messy, overstuffed and occasionally clunky, but it is also a big-hearted thriller about the possibility that the only way forward for any of us, for all of us, is to stop shouting long enough to hear what is being said.