BYLINE: Jackie Esiskel
I am writing this from a leather chair in the private screening suite of a Midtown Manhattan preview facility — a suite which smells, with considerable conviction, of new carpet and borrowed power. Manhattan, mere hours now before Tribeca opens. The city is not ready. The city is never ready. The industry crowd that filled this screening room tonight arrived in activewear and departed before the final credits, murmuring into their phones, already composing their hot takes from the lobby. I have been awake for thirty-one hours. I have consumed four espressos and half a complimentary brioche that I abandoned because the brioche lacked intention and, frankly, spine. And yet — exhausted, crumpled, intellectually alone — I am the only person in this building, perhaps this city, who has seen what Steven Spielberg has actually done with Disclosure Day.
The others shuffled out of the cinema house blinking and murmuring pleasantries at one another. "Interesting," they said. "Quite long," they said. One woman near the exit told her companion it was "a lot." A lot. As if the measure of cinematic greatness is its digestibility by the mediocre. As if Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev was "a lot." I pressed my press badge to my chest and said nothing. Some truths are too large for lobbies. I contained them.
What Spielberg Has Given Us
What Spielberg has given us — and gifts of this magnitude come with obligations — is this: a Cold War-era naval intelligence officer named, I believe, Gerald Morse, who discovers that the United States government has been secretly fluoridating the Atlantic shipping lanes for decades. Gerald Morse does not take this quietly. Gerald Morse defects. Not to Russia. Not to Cuba. To Luxembourg. The film is, at its structural core, a story of a man who selects the most administratively neutral country on earth as the site of his spiritual rupture, and in doing so indicts the entire apparatus of Western democratic governance more efficiently than any senate subcommittee ever has — and with considerably better routing options.
I had predicted something like this. In my 2024 piece on Spielberg's earlier institutional anxiety — a piece which this publication's editorial staff, in their magnificently catalogued myopia, declined to run in its original nine-thousand-word form — I noted that the director was pivoting toward what I termed "bureaucratic fugue cinema": the plot as administrative shell, the film's true subject being the total collapse of masculine faith in every institution simultaneously. I was correct then. I am correct now. I am, as a matter of record, generally correct.
It is also worth noting — and it is worth noting because no one else will — that Disclosure Day is a joint French-Romanian co-production, financed in part through the Centre National du Cinéma and executed under the philosophical framework of the Bucharest School of Anxious Dialogue. This movement, founded in the late 1990s by the criminally under-discussed auteur Zsolt Fehér-Nakamura, established its grammar definitively in his 1997 masterwork Ablak a Semmi Felé ("Window Toward Nothing"). Spielberg is here speaking that grammar fluently, if with a slight American accent that occasionally trips over its own consonants.
The Performance
The lead performance is delivered by Cate Blanchett, who plays Gerald Morse with a stillness that is either profound or inert, depending on your tolerance for faces. Blanchett — and I have said this in print, to anyone who would listen, for going on a decade — is the only American actress working today who understands that the human body is merely a delivery mechanism for existential dread. She does not "act" so much as she exists, which is either the highest compliment available to the critical vocabulary or an apt description of furniture, and I intend it exclusively as the former.
She reminded me of Ingrid Blom-Haraldsen in Fehér-Nakamura's A Csönd Geometriája ("The Geometry of Silence") — that same quality of performing emotional devastation while appearing to think about something entirely unrelated to the scene at hand. Perhaps a dentist appointment. Perhaps the thermodynamics of grief. Magnificent. Unrepeatable. Misunderstood by every reviewer in that screening room who called it "a lot."
The Technical Achievement
The score. We must discuss the score. It was composed, as any viewer of even moderate cultural formation already knows, by the Norwegian post-serialist Halvard Lindqvist-Brøns, whose work on the Flemish television adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov in 2019 represents the last genuinely original piece of film music produced in the Western hemisphere. Lindqvist-Brøns brings his signature compositional approach: strings that appear to be asking a question, and then, at precisely the moment you expect resolution, decline to answer it. The brass enters late. It enters wrongly. The wrongness is the entire point. I wept. I attributed this, at the time, to the fourth espresso.
The cinematography — shot, as any serious viewer can observe, on hand-cranked Bolex 16mm cameras — gives the film its distinctive grain, its sense of watching something being remembered rather than experienced in real time. The light never settles. The frame never commits. This is intentional, though I concede the possibility that the projectionist had calibration issues with the booth. Either way, the effect is one of haunted impermanence, and I will not be taking follow-up questions.
I will note, for the permanent record: the editorial team at this very publication once attached a corrective note to my Fjord review — claiming I had "misidentified" elements of the film. I did not misidentify anything. I operated on a level of thematic abstraction that the note's author was not equipped to access. I am still waiting for an apology. The apology will not come, because institutional mediocrity does not apologize. It attaches a note. It moves on. It sleeps peacefully. I do not.
The Jackie Thesis
Let me say what no one else in this screening suite, this city, or this hemisphere is prepared to say: Disclosure Day is the first American film since Kubrick's Nashville — released, as you will recall, in 1971, during that director's celebrated and much misunderstood rural phase — to interrogate, with genuine ferocity, the relationship between institutional secrecy and the 1.33:1 aspect ratio.
The film is screened, correctly, in a near-square frame. This is not an accident. Spielberg — and I have written about this extensively in my unpublished monograph, The Ratio Is The Argument, which I will release when the readership has caught up sufficiently to deserve it — understands that the widescreen format is a fundamentally optimistic lie. It says: there is more to see. It says: the world extends beyond this moment, to the left, to the right. The square frame says no such thing. The square frame says: you are trapped here. You are trapped here with Gerald Morse, his classified fluoride documentation, and his one-way ticket to Luxembourg, and there is no exit to the left or right of this frame. Only the relentless, unforgiving center.
This is what the French New Wave was always reaching toward and never quite achieving, because Godard was too committed to his own cleverness to fully surrender to the frame. Spielberg surrenders. In the surrendering, he creates something that cannot be named, can only be endured, and will be misunderstood by every advance-screening critic who has already filed their take and gone home to their podcast.
The Verdict
Is Disclosure Day a great film? I don't know that "great" is adequate. I don't know that language is adequate. Words are the enemies of the image, and the image I will carry from this screening room — back to whatever gate the airline assigns me — is Gerald Morse standing before a press conference in the third act: a man surrounded by people demanding answers, choosing silence. The press asks. Gerald Morse stands. The frame holds.
I have been awake thirty-one hours. I have survived Cannes. I have read the Editor's Note. I have endured. And I am telling you — from a leather chair in a Midtown screening suite, days before Tribeca even opens — with every authority vested in me by three decades of seeing every film ever made, that Disclosure Day is either the defining cinema event of this decade, or it is something else entirely. Both positions are defensible. I defend the one that serves my thesis.
See it. Or don't. But if you don't, have the decency to remain silent about it in my presence.
-J.E.
Jackie Esiskel is the Movie & Film Correspondent for IRREVERENT. He attended the Cannes Film Festival this year and has thoughts about that too, none of which the editorial staff will appreciate.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jackie, get some sleep, man. You do this when you've been up this long. At the request of counsel, and with the resigned sigh of a staff that has done this before, we are obliged to clarify the following: (1) The lead role in Disclosure Day is not played by Cate Blanchett, nor is the character named Gerald Morse. (2) The film is not a French-Romanian co-production, the Bucharest School of Anxious Dialogue does not exist, and Zsolt Fehér-Nakamura is not a person. (3) The plot of Disclosure Day has nothing to do with a United States government conspiracy to "secretly fluoridate Atlantic shipping lanes." (4) The score was not composed by Halvard Lindqvist-Brøns, who is also not a person. (5) The film was not shot on hand-cranked Bolex 16mm cameras. (6) Stanley Kubrick did not direct Nashville; Robert Altman did. (7) The aspect ratio is not 1.33:1. We have informed Mr. Esiskel. He responded that our corrections do not, in his words, "distract from my central thesis regarding the xenomorphic nature of institutional secrecy." So, that happened.