Feeling alone, not out of choice but out of external circumstances, is one of our most crushing states of being. Whether it’s being distant from others (or nature or the divine) or feeling like we don’t fit in with who and what surrounds us, so much of our drives as animals is to avoid being out of community. Beyond just our societies and immediate ecosystems, there is that existential ache when thinking too long about our pale blue dot adrift in a universe otherwise empty of identity. What do we do about all this, to have some closeness when we otherwise feel unable to connect? Well, some of us go to the movies.
I found myself there on opening Thursday, having taken a half day off work to celebrate the new Steven Spielberg flick (and see Josh O’Connor, who has easily become my favorite actor over the last year and a half). In Disclosure Day, Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, a television meteorologist with aspirations to become a weekend news anchor. Her co-lead, O’Connor, is Dr. Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity genius with a backpack full of secrets that a dark agency, led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), wants to keep hidden from the public. After Margaret has an inexplicable experience on live television, speaking an unknown language in front of her weather map, Daniel’s world of mystery and danger engulfs her.
Only she is not thrown together with Daniel at first, but spends an uneven amount of the runtime moving toward him. It becomes the core problem with the film’s effectiveness. Throughout the story, Margaret is going through a revelation of anointing, an upheaval of everything she has ever known. She is having a personal disclosure of who she is. Daniel’s awakening happened 15 years before. Although there are reasons for why this needed to happen in the film’s current plot, it leaves an open grave in the film’s structure. Because of Daniel’s distance from his own awakening, the script forces O’Connor to sleepwalk, given so little emotionally to do. I felt I had no foothold for who this character really is or why. Meanwhile, Blunt, clearly up to the task of playing a nuanced woman, steps into the bear-trap that is a 20th-century hysterical female character. Though the context warrants her terror and confusion, the dialogue leaves her paper thin. Together, both actors and their characters feel off, loosely orbiting themes and messages like defunct satellites.
There is a possible version of this film where Margaret and Daniel both experience their journey at the same time, and the movie allows them to animate in parallel storylines before converging in a rich bond of recognition. Instead, Margaret spends a lot of time with boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, who I like elsewhere) and Daniel with his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson). Jackson is a bit of a dead-beat musician who clearly doesn’t appreciate Margaret and offers some unneeded comic relief. Jane is much more interesting, and her background as a former nun novitiate allows Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp to break ground for the film’s interest in faith. But the shovel doesn’t go deep. Jane, important to the film, has moments of a climbing arc, but the film largely vacates her and its themes in the third act. I wonder, walking away from this film twice, why Jackson and Jane are even here. Our leads don’t need partners to make their stories rich, but if they do, should those under-written relationships halt Margaret and Daniel from meeting one another sooner?
Several aspects of this movie truly resonated with me and sparked my enthusiasm for film as an art form.
The most important is when Margaret and Daniel do finally meet. It gives us a glimpse of something grand, something super-natural, how cinema can cultivate profound relationships we’d never even conceive of without filmmakers to show us. That scene is then swallowed by a bland, emotionally-imprecise sequence that conveniently sweeps the characters in the direction they must go. Another element is a telephone call between two characters about religion. The third is two moments in a car chase that, in both IMAX and especially Dolby, were thoroughly satisfying in their flash and volume. I thought this is when the film would pick up in thrill, and although it was already deep into the runtime, I felt hopeful. It never picked up.
There is also a moment in this film–and it’s in the trailer, so I won’t consider it a spoiler–where Margaret and Daniel take each other’s hands for a reason the film will reveal. Margaret begins to say “Whatever happens” to which she and Daniel finish the sentence in unison with “don’t you let go.” This exchange, for me, is the crux of what makes the film so interesting in the themes it’s teething toward. How a shared understanding, a moment people unite in crisis, can bridge minds. It’s phenomenal, but the movie has little interest, much less success, in exploring it. Although Disclosure Day‘s colossal finale locks into images of unity, the last moments feel wrenched away from the 2026 American culture the film tries to speak to.
I consider my strength and weakness as an audience member to be my little interest in finding plot holes. I enjoy being taken up in a film’s flow, hypnotized by even silly hand-waving. I can suspend disbelief to a fault. Yet with Disclosure Day, I feel so many of the sieve’s gaps where not only the logic, but the purpose, slip out. There is such little explanation for why this or why that at every turn, and in a movie that so badly wants to inspire us into action, into compassion, its care for the mechanisms of its own story are not vague–they’re vacant.
There are so many ways to feel close to others. A near-infinite number. If you’re reading this I don’t have to tell you that some films–and storytelling broadly–can help us see ourselves (and, more importantly, others) in new ways that empower us to make more informed decisions as value-seeking beings. Disclosure Day is a hand, pointing at a hand, which is pointing at something real. But it swerves away from its characters’ need for the very empathy and connection it purports to preach. I am reminded that it was Spielberg who convinced the makers of 2024’s Twisters to cut the kiss between two characters who had greatly earned a moment of sincere passion. Although romance is not the point of Disclosure Day, nor need it be, keeping the warmth of the story’s spotlight on the characters’ bonds would have elevated the themes and experiences of the film. Margaret and Daniel are the only people in their world who can understand each other. How remarkable. How I wish this film cared about them and was honest enough, and painfully precise, regarding the ways we need each other. I don’t want a hand pointing, but a hand reaching out to mine.
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