Holly Price reviews Spielberg’s new blockbuster about feeling lost at home and searching for wonder – one you might want to pass on to a sci‑fi‑loving friend.

This article first appeared on Seen & Unseen, a project of LICC. 

What if there was undeniable proof that we’re not alone on Earth? Truth has the power to set people free, but it can also send us scrambling for cover. 

Our summer blockbusters are no longer just about saving the planet. They’re about finding where we belong within it. Even the auteur‑driven spectacles – Disclosure Day (in cinemas now), The Odyssey (July) and The End of Oak Street (August) – follow characters searching for a way home in a world that no longer feels like one.  

And this sense of being adrift at home isn’t confined to the big screen. It shows up on Netflix in The Boroughs, on the BBC in A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and in Disney‑Pixar’s Hoppers – revealing just how deeply this resonates across generations.   

Fear of full disclosure 

Steven Spielberg’s conspiracy-thriller Disclosure Day captures this uncanny sense of un-home through its cinematography (by Janusz Kamiński). Shot on 35mm film for realism, it often uses ‘oner’ tracking shots that build tension as if everything is unfolding live. At other times, the camera circles or arcs over characters; elsewhere it turns handheld, restless, almost unstable. Close-ups feel confrontational.   

It’s as if you’re being pulled through a moment you can’t pause, in a world that won’t stay still, until you’re forced to eyeball the truth.   

In today’s climate, deception feels commonplace. Scandals, secrets and reckonings rise to the surface daily – as do the competing ‘truths’ that follow in their wake. Social media has taught us to question what authorities, influencers and researchers present as fact, but it has also normalised hiding less-presentable facts about ourselves.   

At the centre of this story are two ordinary people, cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and weather anchor Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt). Both are used to presenting curated versions of themselves and to suppressing the uneasy sense that they don’t quite belong.   

Because fear of full disclosure can be just as terrifying as fear of the unknown.   

We are already fighting to find our place in the world – add non-human life into the equation, and where does that leave us?   

From passenger to experiencer   

And yet something in us refuses to stop searching – not just for information (we have plenty of that), but for truth.   

Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it dismantles the life we’ve built. We want to experience what is real.   

Disclosure Day returns to one of Spielberg’s most enduring themes, but from a fresh perspective. ‘I’ve never made a movie from my own belief system,’ he has said. ‘This was not science-fiction. This was … about the truth – about the unknown being known by some, but not by all.’  

Daniel stumbles upon irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial life – hidden for decades by a private organisation, supposedly to preserve society as we know it. The project is led by the ironically named Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth).   

‘People are starved for the truth’, says Daniel’s handler, Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo). And yet the truth can’t simply be dumped online and expected to land. It must be encountered. Walked into.   

Coming home to the truth requires a kind of initiation – a passage rather than a download. Truth needs a translator.   

The gift of truly knowing someone  

Enter Margaret (beautifully rendered by Emily Blunt).   

Daniel understands the language that underpins the world – maths. But Margaret understands people. She begins speaking languages she has never learnt, but her gift runs deeper still: she can read hearts.   

If there is something bigger than us, then perhaps our purpose is not just self-discovery or self-protection, but something beyond ourselves. Together, Daniel and Margaret reveal a humanity that is flawed yet searching – for a truth that reaches the soul.   

For all its riveting chases, archive footage and ethereal light, the revelation of Disclosure Day is empathy.   

The heart of David Koepp’s script is this: to truly see another person. To look into a soul and dare to understand their story.   

The most disarming moments are the quiet ones – tender, unexpected unravellings where a guarded heart is suddenly revealed and simply held.   

And it raises a deeper question: Are the stories we build our lives on strong enough to hold us when everything else gives way?  

In one fleeting moment, Margaret and Daniel lock eyes, clasp hands and say: ‘Whatever happens, don’t you let go.’   

The truth who calls us home

Hugo offers a cryptic instruction: ‘The way to know your purpose is to go back to where it all began.’   

Cynicism has trained us to distrust wonder. We dismiss belief as childish or reject it as control. But Disclosure Day asks a gentler question: What if our natural capacity for wonder – and for empathy – has been crowded out by fear, power and self-protection?  

Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), a nun who has ‘lost her calling’, embodies this tension (albeit in not as fully realised a character as others). As her worldview stretches to breaking point, love and fear collide. The question becomes: which will she trust?   

Because ultimately, trust is what allows truth to land. To receive revelation, we need to encounter it through someone trustworthy.   

Through all the noise, is there still a voice we can trust – calling us home? A voice that has been there since the beginning. A source of love, light and truth beyond us, yet present with us. One who sees us fully, knows us deeply, and holds us in our unravelling.   

Perhaps we have seen evidence that we are not alone after all.