Disclosure Day spoilers follow.
When Emily Blunt's weather presenter Margaret Fairchild begins speaking in tongues live on air, it becomes abundantly apparent to those around her that something is wrong. Her boyfriend (Wyatt Russell) is dismissive of her newfound seemingly-psychic abilities, but he has bigger concerns. Namely, World War Three.
The world in which Disclosure Day is set is recognisably our contemporary one, with a few flourishes (some funky looking USB sticks, mostly). The tension we're all feeling about the state of global politics is cranked up a notch with some vague references to something brewing between North and South Korea, and movement of Russian and US troops – though where to, or why, remains unnamed.
Set against this chaotic backdrop is the human-centred story of Margaret and hacker-turned-cyber-security-expert-turned-'traitor' Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) who also possesses an innate, inhumane gift. His is for numbers, hers is for feelings. Why has Daniel turned traitor? Well, it's all to do with an interrogation video he watched. And who was being interrogated? An alien.
We only see a few seconds of it, but it's clear that it is, frankly, a graphic video, complete with shrill screams of a distressed creature. It's enough to turn him, Daniel explains to his former-nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), and he believes that if the world knew what this secret group of American tech and military powers were doing to these aliens, we would surely be aghast.
As the movie progresses, we learn a little more about the aliens, mostly through Colman Domingo's impassioned monologues as Hugo, the leader of the group of 'traitors' seeking to make humanity aware not only of the aliens' existence, but of how they're being treated. Hugo – like director Steven Spielberg – believes in empathy above all else. That given the chance, the knowledge, people will rise to the occasion.
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By the end of the movie, you want to believe it too. You want to believe that when Margaret takes over the news station and reveals the decades of footage that proves not only do aliens exist, but how horribly humanity has treated them, despite being on the actual eve of a global war, people would come together. People would listen.
It's a wonderful message. But…
This time, as your writer sits to pen this in the same 2026 the movie is seemingly set, there is too much proof already that humans are not the empathetic creatures Spielberg so badly wants us to be. His movies are often filled with this kind of hope, built on the foundation that people are fundamentally good, fundamentally capable of feeling each other's joy and pain in equal measure.
But we only have to look around us to see that isn't the world we live in. Because we know how people treat each other. Scores of viral videos of police shootings, of internment camps, of global leaders spouting anti-LGBTQ+ hate, of ICE snatching children from their parents' arms, to see that our empathy has its limits. We already have the knowledge, and for all of us who are outraged at the way we treat each other, there are enough people who aren't that things don't change. Margaret may implore us to listen, but the reality is World War Three would likely kick off with a bang, regardless.
Because Disclosure Day makes no reference to the actual world its set in – to the current, real, geopolitics of our time, to anti-trans rhetoric, to tech and oil billionaires pillaging our planet – it's asking for a leap too far of our suspension of disbelief. The videos of aliens wouldn't exist in a vacuum. They'd exist on X and LinkedIn and Facebook, amongst troves of videos depicting the same kinds of violence being perpetrated.
Of course, Disclosure Day is escapism. It gives us the chance to see ourselves the way Spielberg sees us, or wants us to be. Maybe we would empathise with the aliens. Maybe we would listen.
But that begs another question, one equally as unsettling. Why would we empathise with the aliens when it's so hard to empathise with each other? Would a video of an alien being put through extreme interrogation be more upsetting to watch than a video of a cop squeezing someone's neck until they die? Would knowing an alien was stripped of their right to bodily autonomy be more easily empathisable than a trans-teen being stripped of theirs? Would learning that living, breathing, sentient beings have been kept captive for decades be harder to bear than the fact that Palestinians are being starved?
This isn't a case of measuring one injustice against another, trying to say one is worse. All of the horrible real-world things mentioned in this story are part of the bigger problem – a problem based in fear and greed and the fundamental flaw in human nature: that we are not as empathetic as we should be.
But Disclosure Day doesn't push the viewer enough to examine this. It lets the audience off the hook of forcing us to face ourselves and our lack of empathy. By stripping the world of its real conflicts, swapping them for fictional ones, the message feels equally devoid of relatability.
This isn't to say the message of Disclosure Day is wrong or unworthy of attention. It isn't. We should listen. We should value empathy as an evolutionary advantage because if we did, maybe we would stop treating each other so badly.
Disclosure Day is out now in cinemas.
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Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance film critic and journalist, with a focus on J-drama & film, and the Japanese production industry. She was previously Locations Editor at Screen International and Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. Her writing can also befound in Curzon, 1883, and more. A born and raised New Yorker, she loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
