Disclosure Day review: 'riffs on the amped-up chaos of the current moment'

Disclosure Day (12A) ★★★★

Steven Spielberg hasn’t made a movie like Disclosure Day since the early 2000s, when A.I., Minority Report and War of the Worlds formed a triptych of prescient sci-fi thrillers that caught the darkening mood of America at the dawn of the digital age and the onset of the War on Terror. It seems appropriate, then, that he should be making a major return to the genre with a movie that riffs on the amped-up chaos and uncertainty of the current moment.

Kicking off with a sinister tech firm hunting down a whistleblower-on-the-run while America is on the brink of a Cuban Missile Crisis-style stand-off with Russia and North Korea, Disclosure Day feels very much of a piece with War of the Worlds and its cohorts. But it’s actually less a continuation of those films than a conclusion to the more hopeful strain of sci-fi he began with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., optimistic tales of first contact shot through with the obsessive childlike wonder that’s been a defining trait of his career.

It stars Josh O’Connor as the aforementioned whistleblower, Daniel Kellner, a nerdy cyber hacker turned security consultant for a shadowy company contracted by the government to hide the truth about alien activity from the public. The latter is headed up by Colin Firth’s Noah Scanlon, a ruthless advocate for the suppression of information who’s not averse to using a mysterious piece of alien tech to invade people’s minds like a malevolent Professor X, albeit with Spielberg deploying a striking bit of visual sleight-of-hand (it involves changing eye colours) to give these scenes a creepy flourish of their own.

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Daniel’s already had his own eyes opened to the nefarious nature of his employer by the mysterious Hugo (Colman Domingo); and Spielberg keeps his narrative cards close to his chest by dropping us into the action in medias res as Daniel and his in-the-dark girlfriend (Eve Hewson) desperately try to get off the grid. But he also gives us a classic Spielberg naif in the form of Emily Blunt’s character, Margaret Fairchild, an aspiring broadcast journalist reduced to dues-paying stints reading the weather.

It’s Margaret who becomes the film's other focal point as she suddenly finds herself not only able to speak Russian, Korean and weird strains of alien dialect on air, but is blessed with a kind of sudden onset clairvoyance that allows her to read the minds of anyone she encounters and empathise with whatever they’re going through, something the film posits as its own superpower in an age in which outrage and polarisation are the defining traits.

As Margaret and Daniel gravitate towards each other, Spielberg’s willingness to embrace overly familiar genre tropes like crop circles, celestial light shows and alien abductions can make the ensuing mystery at the heart of Disclosure Day seem more prosaic than the high-end blockbuster filmmaking bringing it to life. But what filmmaking. Operating at the top of his game, Spielberg delivers one casually spectacular set-piece after another (a freight-train assisted car chase is a highlight) and, though the ambiguous ending might suggest he has more faith in humanity’s capacity for change than is reasonable, there’s something to be said for watching the most naturally gifted filmmaker of his generation continue to push himself as a director while still trying to find light in the darkness.

In cinemas from 10 June

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