With Close Encounters of the Third Kind Steven Spielberg promised an encounter and delivered one. Disclosure Day announces a precisely scheduled disclosure but at the last moment, just as a world-changing message is about to be delivered, cuts off the mic. “Listen,” says Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, the Kansas City meteorologist who is now the spokesperson for an extraterrestrial species. She is about to translate for a global TV audience the first certified cosmic communication. Instead the screen goes dark and the credits roll. It is like one of those dreams whose internal contradictions force the dreamer to wake, with a head full of jarring signals. It is hard to imagine any other ending. To go further would be to venture (as some of the characters in Disclosure Day seem tempted) into the realm of religious revelation.

Close Encounters was a different sort of dream, happily and wordlessly mysterious to the end, an orchestrated trance. It invited surrender, without worrying much about to whom or what you were surrendering. Airplanes miraculously materialized in a desert. Tempests and apparitions subverted the laws of physics. Alien languages were encoded in musical intervals. In the near absence of backstory and exegesis, the screen seemed given over to a gradual invasion by the uncanny.

Disclosure Day by contrast is more jagged in effect. It is more essay than poem, a mosaic juxtaposing pieces of different possible films, intercut with the gusto of Griffith’s Intolerance. A foot stomping on the floor of a wrestling ring is an appropriate signal to set things in motion, as within minutes we witness an abduction, an interrogation, an escape, and the beginning of a chase that in one form or another will wind through the whole film. Piece by piece we learn that the most important information in human history is contained in a lightweight backpack, that the contents of the backpack have been purloined by a rogue agent of a seemingly all-powerful entity known as the Wardex Corporation, and that the young defector, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), has vowed to bring about “full disclosure to the whole world all at once.”

The Wardex agents operate ruthlessly—Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) has been bloodied about the face—but they have their reasons, to judge by the harangues of their fanatical chief Noah (Colin Firth): “The world is on the brink!” “History doesn’t have a reset button!” Nuclear war appears to be in the offing. Revealing the contents of the backpack could only make matters worse. Daniel has other ideas, and with the help of a lethally powerful device that looks like a small metal bar (it might be a miniaturized version of Kubrick’s black slabs) he drives off with Jane to take refuge in a convent where, it emerges, she was once a novitiate. This device, salvaged from the crash of an “exotic” extraterrestrial craft, will turn out to be an all-purpose tool enabling teleportation, mind control, shields of invisibility, and much more.

Its use and misuse proves invaluable for getting in and out of sticky situations. There are many such situations, since Wardex is equipped with a bank of super-advanced computers and a fleet of black cars driven by black-uniformed enforcers, who will ceaselessly track down Daniel and the small underground of “disclosers” to which he belongs, renegade Wardex employees determined to reveal once and for all the great secret: that extraterrestrials have been visiting Earth at least as far back as the 1940s. The truth has been suppressed by the government and even inside the government—the president is out of the loop—and Wardex functions as a state within a state behind fronts like a decommissioned Air Force base and a meat processing plant whose entrance is marked by a larger-than-life statue of a cow.

In most of the science fiction movies of the 1950s that have left such a visible mark on Spielberg’s work—movies like The War of the Worlds or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers—aliens tended to be malevolent forces, and humanity’s militant response was a matter of survival. A smaller number of outliers such as The Day the Earth Stood Still or It Came from Outer Space called out human suspicion of the unknown as being itself the crucial problem. In such films, xenophobia was inextricably entwined with the nuclear destructiveness that the aliens had often come to warn against. In Disclosure Day, the motives for the program of suppression are left deliberately vague. It purports to be a matter of national security, defending against an entity that is presumed to be hostile, and which in any case would by its mere existence instill panic and civilizational collapse. Beneath that is the implication of alien technology reverse-engineered for sinister purposes not spelled out. The aliens, on the other hand, for all their terrifyingly superior powers, apparently have only one message: Do not be afraid.

The film’s preliminary scurrying around does little more than establish a mood of ominous anticipation. True uncanniness enters with the unexpected hilarity of a weather report. When Emily Blunt starts delivering a forecast of hail on a note of barely contained ecstasy, against the sparkling colors of a TV station backdrop, it marks the intrusion of something more inexplicable than musings on the irrevocability of history, the frailty of civilization, or the moral imperative to disclose the truth. From the moment she appears on screen, Blunt infuses the proceedings with a rhythm of chipper breathlessness on the edge of unacknowledged panic. It is a performance that manages to make credible the notion that Margaret Fairchild is the unknowing vehicle for alien forces who have been in secret communication with her since childhood. Nothing in the film can quite match the abrupt weirdness of the moment when she begins speaking in Russian to her baffled boyfriend, but Margaret continues to change with every scene, oscillating between speedy exhilaration and distraught meltdown. She becomes the center of the film by embodying the chaos of transition from one state of awareness to another. By comparison the other characters become types: the Humanist Sage, the Saintly Nun, the Clueless Suitor, the Inwardly Troubled Tyrant, the Brutal Loyalist.

It is hard to imagine how the film would work without this performance. For any of this to feel remotely real we need to believe that Margaret is possessed by the incomprehensible. Otherwise there would not be any shiver of an alien presence. We would be left on the one hand with exposition and debate, and on the other with the superbly executed action scenes expected of Spielberg. The action has the flavor of an homage to silent comedy. A car drives through a ramshackle house; another is demolished by a train while Daniel and Margaret scramble to save themselves; in a final tour de force, Noah’s storm troopers keep smacking farcically into walls and fire trucks made invisible by the alien device.

The debates scattered throughout the film have to do with questions like whether or not to put trust in superintelligent extraterrestrials, or whether or not the revelation that the aliens are real will destroy human religious faith and thereby bring down civilization. The religious question is addressed by Sister Maura, abbess of Jane’s former convent, with the argument that God gave humanity dominion over the Earth but not over other worlds, and that the universe could not have been created for humans alone. These theological issues swirl around the fringes but can hardly be resolved with a few lines of dialogue. They find a more graphic expression when Jane, subjected to questioning by Noah’s mesmeric astral projection, keeps him at bay by grinding a crucifix medallion into the palm of her hand. Drops of blood pool picturesquely on the floor beneath her chair. Later, in an image even more redolent of ancient martyrdom narratives, she will stab herself in the hand in order to dispel Noah’s remote influence. To that extent, God would appear to be on the side of the extraterrestrials.

The movie certainly is. Early on we are shown snippets of Daniel’s stolen archive documenting decades of evidence, including filmed records of the torture of aliens who survived the crash. Hugo (Colman Domingo), the leader of the disclosers, has vowed to end what he calls a “seventy-nine-year terror campaign.” When Noah (still in his astral body) accuses Hugo of being the dupe of the aliens, he retorts: “They regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage.” This is as close as we get to a planetary culture whose further details, and location, are not revealed. As far as can be determined, they might be starry messengers sent to initiate us into a higher and more peaceful level of consciousness.

Daniel and Margaret were for whatever reason designated by them as conduits, and when the two are brought together by Hugo, hands jointly clasped over The Device, they recover the repressed memory of being abducted and instructed by the aliens. This fusion occurs in the classic Spielbergian setting of a child’s bedroom—Margaret’s as she relives the childhood visitation—a bedroom decked out with an extraordinary profusion of trinkets, toys, and keepsakes. The child is singing “Someday My Prince Will Come” when the aliens enter her room in animal form. (They have been manifesting this way throughout the movie, as cardinal or fox or deer.) In the dark she walks through strangely warm snow toward a glistening spacecraft.

After this seemingly climactic episode the film still has quite a long way to go, with Margaret and the others dodging the Wardex squads while making their way to the Kansas City TV station from which the disclosure is to be made. Despite all opposition the action unfolds as intended, and we see viewers all over the world watching the download of Daniel’s archive on their TVs and smartphones: grainy footage of UFO flybys and crashes, human-alien encounters, the recovery of bodies and the torture of the living. Even the soldiers in readiness to fight in the imminent world war are watching.

We are to entertain the idea that the release of this material will be enough to precipitate a universal conversion experience. That was the way it happened in movies like The Next Voice You Hear… (1950), in which God was depicted as making simultaneous radio broadcasts in every language, and Red Planet Mars (1952), in which an intercepted transmission revealed a Christian population inhabiting Mars. The narrative is no more persuasive in the Balkanized media world of the twenty-first century, in a technological moment when mere photography and cinema are rapidly losing any remaining claim to serve as airtight evidence. The episode owes its chief emotional force to a brief and powerful cameo by Courtney Grace as an NBC anchorwoman overwhelmed by the unfolding revelation. But what sort of unity might emerge from all who have been stunned by the disclosure remains imponderable.

Disclosure Day, which is presumably set Some Time in the Near Future, hovers in a curious way between the present and the era of Spielberg’s childhood. Here, as then, the United States and Russia are poised on the edge of nuclear confrontation. A world crisis converges on the 38th parallel. References to fail-safe points and the Cuban missile crisis crop up in the background chatter. All this history merges indiscriminately with the traditions according to which extraterrestrials landed on Earth in the twentieth century, if not earlier, and the American government knows this and has steadily suppressed the evidence. This counter-history was already firmly established in books like Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) and Gray Barker’s They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956), and has been embellished continually ever since.

Spielberg’s film was preceded last year by The Age of Disclosure, a film by Dan Farah that covered much of the same ground not as speculative fiction but as documentary fact, with walk-ons by Marco Rubio and Kirsten Gillibrand, among many others. With the release of long-secret government files on UFO sightings (although with far less impact than envisaged by Spielberg), the appointment by the White House of an advisory council on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, and public speculation by J.D. Vance on the possibly demonic nature of extraterrestrial intruders, the evolving storyline continues to quiver with life.

A symbolic or allegorical reading of Disclosure Day raises the question of what is being symbolized or allegorized. The lore of ufology is a maze that leads in many directions and down many rabbit holes, and has lent itself to every manner of spiritual speculation and political paranoia. The abrupt curtailment of the final disclosure calls into question not only what might come next but what exactly has come before. We have the impression not of a final convergence but of having burrowed through the discordant episodes of an unresolvable serial. We can get no nearer to the future than a wall of television screens stretching to infinity. If not intended as a history film like Lincoln or Amistad, Disclosure Day will nevertheless inevitably be a piece of the history of the present era, whenever or by whom that history may be written. As Colman Domingo’s Hugo remarks toward the film’s end: “There will be no other day like tomorrow.”