REVIEW: ‘Disclosure Day’ Is A Profound Exploration Of Faith

Disclosure Day is the culmination of everything Steven Spielberg has ever wondered, feared, or dreamed about. It’s about hope, humanity, history, and the profound belief we must have in one another if we dare to live in a better tomorrow.

Disclosure Day isn’t naive, and it’s not condescending, either. David Koepp’s screenplay is confounding, John Williams’ score is sparse but just slightly off-putting, and Janusz Kamimiński’s camerawork is dizzying. But the message of Disclosure Day is clear: We have to have faith in something to survive as a species.

For a movie about aliens, Disclosure Day is really about faith. When it opens in media res, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is most concerned about his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson). As they narrowly escape the authorities, Jane takes them to hide at a convent where she once lived. 

Disclosure Day wrestles profoundly with faith.

From the very beginning, Disclosure Day wrestles with faith. Yes, through conversations between Jane, Daniel, and Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), in the context of a church. But the conversations aren’t about Jesus or a Christian God. They’re about faith altogether, why people do and don’t have it, and what that faith is or isn’t actually placed in.

It’s a shocking way to begin a movie that, one presumes, is about a plot to expose the truth about aliens, even though the movie is vague about its premise for the first third. But Disclosure Day is designed entirely to disorient and confound you, because life is confusing, and simple answers would lead to too many more questions.

In fact, the movie doesn’t even introduce you to any of its characters or its plot before throwing you immediately into the action. And it rarely stops to explain things to you, either. To a degree, this is hard to get on board with. Few characters truly feel like full human beings, since they lack motives or internality.

The disorientation throughout the movie is a litmus test for the viewers.

The camera is also constantly twirling around, the sounds are loud, and the action is harsh. Some of Spielberg’s most beloved pieces of movie magic are on full display, despite hard-to-look-at CGI. But all of the confusion is a litmus test. The movie wants you off balance so that when faced with the truth, you’ll discover whether you have enough faith yourself to see it or if you’ll let cynicism and disillusionment turn you away.

Because the truth is not merely that there are aliens being hidden from the public. The deeper truth is that it’s never been disclosed because humanity fundamentally just does not have enough faith in anything—God, the universe, each other, what have you—to risk the consequences of doing so. The fear is that revealing aliens will shatter their faith. But what if it actually awakened an even deeper faith, instead?

While Daniel and Jane are being chased around by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, another whole half of a movie is taking place. A weather reporter, Margaret Fairchild, suddenly begins speaking languages she doesn’t know and understands everything about every person she looks at, and more so, she knows exactly what to say to help heal their greatest pains.

Disclosure Day is Emily Blunt’s best work yet.

Her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), is the stand-in for the overwhelmed audience. He tries to support Margaret, but he just cannot have enough faith in what he’s experiencing, even as it happens, irrefutably, before his eyes.

But for Margaret, in what may be Blunt’s best performance yet, thanks to her dizzying, tumbling sincerity and vulnerability, the chaos is relieving. Giving herself over to something she doesn’t understand is liberating and actually feels good—especially compared to the constant anxiety and self-doubt she’s otherwise encumbered by.

And that is what Disclosure Day is about. True, genuine faith is liberating. It’s so easy to write faith off as constricting religions that tell you how to live your life, or how to judge others for living theirs. Or to misunderstand faith as the blind acceptance of a convenient truth or popular notion.

True, genuine faith is liberating.

No. Faith is wrestling with the unknowable, but believing fundamentally that the truth can be found somewhere in the sum of all our experiences. It just requires the ears to listen for it and the empathy to feel what can’t be seen. Each side is profoundly explored through the experiences of Daniel and Margaret, with details slowly—but never fully—revealed as Disclosure Day races forward. It can’t hand you everything. You have to listen and discover some truths for yourself.

Colman Domingo’s Hugo Wakefield is the ultimate test of your faith as a viewer. A foil to Noah Scanlon, ideologically and in portrayal, Domingo brings an earnestness to what transpires that’s so intense it’s easy to wonder whether he’s a true believer or actually a villain.

In constant close-up as an unclear construction project takes place around him, he speaks in obtuse and hard-to-follow dialogue, but you’re transfixed by him anyway. You’re beckoned towards him just like Margaret and Daniel are because you want to believe that in his kind hands and thoughtful eyes, there will be safety, community, and peace, at least in a world on the brink of destruction as the plot unfolds in the unwitting outside world.

Disclosure Day is about what comes next, the day after the truth is revealed.

Disclosure Day is sometimes meandering. It gets caught up in small moments that feel real, but in context, do draw away from the fast-paced plot at hand. But so is life. It’s a beautiful admission by a man long obsessed with whether other life is really out there that it’s not actually about the little grey men.

But it’s also Spielberg at his most earnest. It’s him contemplating, yet again, whether we can relive our childhoods, or at least live in their magic again. It’s him asking whether we can go back to trusting everyone around us and believing we can all take care of one another.

Really though, Disclosure Day is about what comes next, the day after the truth is revealed. Will we look at images of what horrors humanity has wrought and weep, or will we turn away and choose not to believe what we see clearly for ourselves? Will we be selfish and act like our needs outweigh those of others, or will we have faith that every living being, of this earth or beyond, wonders, fears, hopes, dreams, and believes in something, just like we do? Spielberg doesn’t have the answer, but he hopes we’ll spend a lifetime trying to find out, just like he has.

Disclosure Day is playing in theaters everywhere June 12th.