In what might be his biggest movie to date, Josh O’Connor stars as Dr Daniel Keller, a cybersecurity expert who discovers evidence of extraterrestrial activity. 

The movie dives headfirst into UFO — or UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena), as they are officially known as now — folklore, along with the urban legends that orbit it. Government cover-ups. Secret contact with extraterrestrials. The nagging suspicion that someone, somewhere, knows more than they are letting on. Disclosure Day folds all that paranoia into a conspiracy thriller, but beneath the tension is something unmistakably Spielbergian: sincerity.

And that earnestness comes naturally. Spielberg has described himself as a believer in alien life “since [he] made Close Encounters 50 years ago,” he told the Associated Press. “But I would always say: until I’ve seen a UAP or a UFO with my own eyes, I’m not going to categorically state that life from out there has come here. But I’ve changed that,” he added, citing “circumstantial evidence which is overwhelming”. He has even said, rather cryptically, that he does not “consider [Disclosure Day] to be science fiction”.

That puts the movie in fascinating company.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived in 1977, when America was already steeped in distrust of authority following Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation. Spielberg tapped into that unease, turning government secrecy and the possibility of extraterrestrial contact into something thrillingly plausible — while never losing his sense of wonder.

Every time Spielberg has returned to aliens, he has found a new way to approach the subject matter. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial turned a stranded visitor into an icon of childhood loneliness and suburban awe. War of the Worlds transformed H.G. Wells’ invasion story into a post-9/11 survival nightmare. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t strictly an alien movie, but it draws on the flying-saucer fantasies of 1950s sci-fi.

Now, Disclosure Day taps into another obsession of the moment: government transparency about evidence (if any) of extraterrestrial life.

In that sense, the movie shares plenty of DNA with Close Encounters. Both arrive in eras marked by distrust, division, and anxiety over what those in power might be keeping from the public. “We’re living in an incredibly hostile, fractured world,” O’Connor told Time. “In [these] times, what we need is humility, and there’s nothing better to see how small we are in the grand scheme of things than to have visitors come.”

O’Connor and Blunt give the movie the human pulse it needs. Blunt, especially, seizes attention in an early live-broadcast scene in which Margaret appears to be possessed, producing a barrage of strange sounds that only Daniel can understand.

“I said, ‘Maybe I could come in, and we’ll just do a range of weird sounds,’” Blunt said on Hot Ones. “I did sort of the clicking sounds, I did sort of humming sounds, consonant sounds, breathing, strange sounds.” Sound designer Gary Rydstrom then layered the audio with subtle animal vocalisations — including, fascinatingly, noises from an editor’s pet cat.

Colman Domingo as Hugo Wakefield, a high-level Wardex employee turned defector

Then there’s Noah, who leads a Men in Black-like organisation called Wardex. He may look like the villain, but Firth sees someone more complicated beneath the surface.

“[Noah] presents as a villain, but as the story rolls forward, you see there are layers of complexity in his desire to protect the information he knows and in his belief that the world will spiral into chaos if certain truths were made known,” Firth told Elle India. “Perhaps he sees himself as a kind of well-meaning parent who wants to protect his children from certain terrible truths about the world,” he added.

That makes Noah even more dangerous. He isn’t simply guarding a secret; he believes he has the right to decide what the world can handle.

For all its unsettling moments, though, Disclosure Day leaves room for something Spielberg has rarely abandoned: hope. In a world that seems to grow more fractured by the day, perhaps awe can still bring people together.

“One of the things that unites us, one of the places we can find common ground, is our united belief that the extraordinary is possible, and the impossible is possible,” Spielberg told CBS News.

Generations of filmmakers have chased the sense of wonder that Spielberg’s movies inspire. But nobody makes audiences look up, lean in, and believe quite like him.

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