‘Disclosure Day’ is a Film of Dueling Dybbuks

If there is one theme that resonates throughout the 55-year career of Steven Spielberg, it is his interest in the possibility of life somewhere else in the vast universe. He has explored that idea in some of his most successful films, beginning with “Close Encounters of The Third Kind” in 1977, and in “E.T. – the Extra-Terrestrial” five years later, in 1982. He continued it in “War of the Worlds” in 2006, and even in the 2008 “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” where alien life became a plot element.

This summer, he’s returned to this favored subject, with “Disclosure Day,” which stars Emily Blunt in a terrific performance as Margaret Fairchild, a television weather girl who gets involved with a rogue computer expert played by Josh O’Connor. He has stolen the records the government has kept of alien visits to America and he’s on the run. His pursuer is his former employer and its CEO who has kept watch over the government’s secret documents and wants them back.

O’Connor as the rogue computer expert, Dr. Daniel Kellner, intends to make public the video records he has carefully copied on a series of storage devices he has stashed away. That’s coming on Disclosure Day.

Kellner is not unlike the real-life whistleblower, Edward Snowden. He is the former contractor at the government’s National Security Agency who leaked a trove of secret government documents that revealed an extensive global surveillance program run by the United States government with the help of the largest international telecommunication companies. He eventually ended up in Russia, where he was granted asylum and became a citizen in 2022.

Part of what gives the film its otherworldly edge is the role that mind control plays in the effort to make public the stolen records. The company that has employed Kellner has developed a device that can take over and control the action of another person even though they may be hundreds of miles away.

Likewise, Fairchild finds she can suddenly speak fluent Russian, can effortlessly read the most intimate thoughts of others and finds herself spontaneously speaking an alien language. She’s being controlled, too.

As a dramatic device being possessed by mysterious outside forces is nothing new, over a hundred years ago, Yiddish-speaking theater audiences in Eastern Europe were captivated by Shloyme Rappaport’s, “The Dybbuk,” in which a young woman becomes possessed by an evil spirit of her beloved. He is the dybbuk of Jewish folklore.

The story is said to have been developed from the life of a 19th century Hassidic rebbe who was a master at exorcising the dybbuks that were said to have inhabited the bodies of some of his followers.

The play inspired George Gershwin to begin a project to turn the story into a production for the Metropolitan Opera. Because of contractual difficulties, it was never realized but Gershwin was energized to pursue another opera project soon after that eventually became “Porgy and Bess.”

On screen, “The Dybbuk” became one of the most successful productions of the brief Yiddish language film renaissance in Eastern Europe of the 1930s.

Both of the stars of Spielberg’s new film must contend with their own individual dybbuks. It’s a kind of drama of the dueling dybbuks that animates the fast-moving suspenseful film that has some truly impressive sequences. One of the film’s best is when the two stars narrowly escape from their automobile after one of their pursuers smashes it into a moving freight train.

But for all its technical skill and impressive performances, the film lacks much of the magic of Spielberg’s earlier work. Not only does it lack the emotional punch of an “E.T.” or a “Close Encounters,” but it ties up its story a little too neatly to be truly believed, even as a first-rate Hollywood thriller. Somehow, this breathless pursuit of political optimism in today’s world is not very convincing.

It’s been a while since the great director has had commercial success, and, based on the lukewarm response of audiences so far, particularly among the young, it may not make its considerable production budget and its equally large marketing and promotion costs.

The world is infinitely more complex than when Spielberg first began his quest to bring an appreciation of the wonder of otherworldly life. The enemies of wonder are not only government bureaucrats and their hired hands, they are more widespread and threatening than Spielberg would have us believe and in “Disclosure Day” that sense of pervasive menace never develops.