Steven Spielberg’s latest return to alien contact is moving from theaters to the shelf, which means one of the film’s strangest unanswered questions is getting a little more daylight. Disclosure Day is now available to rent digitally, and its 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD editions arrive Aug. 25 with bonus material that gets into Margaret’s powers, among other Spielberg-sized concerns.

What Margaret’s powers actually do

In Disclosure Day, Margaret, played by Emily Blunt, is one of two people given powers by alien visitors preparing to reveal themselves to humanity. It is a very calm plan, apparently, if your definition of calm includes quietly rewriting the rules of human perception.

Her counterpart, played by John O’Connor, has a simpler gift: he can instinctively understand math and machines. Margaret’s ability is more slippery. She is an empath, but not in the casual “good listener” sense. Her power lets her lock eyes with another person and immediately understand them at a deep, sometimes overwhelming level.

That makes her gift harder to explain in a neat sentence, but also potentially more powerful. Machines can be decoded. People, inconveniently, tend to come with grief, joy, fear, and several layers of emotional bad wiring.

Emily Blunt breaks down the eye-lock mystery

In a behind-the-scenes interview included with the home release, Blunt explains that the filmmakers treated Margaret’s ability as something flexible rather than fixed. The effect changes depending on who Margaret connects with and how much control she has over what is happening.

Blunt says:

“There’s different iterations of these abilities, like when she eye-locks with someone... I think we’ve experimented with different versions depending on who she’s eye-locking with and how comfortable she is with these powers... When she’s able to drop in on them and read everything, and everything that causes them pain or joy... It can be deliberate, or it can be happenstance, or it can surprise her, or it can surprise the person... That changes throughout the film, too.

That explanation helps clarify why Margaret’s scenes can feel more unpredictable than O’Connor’s. His character’s gift has a practical, visible use. Margaret’s works like emotional x-ray vision, The film treats it as both a gift and a serious burden.

Spielberg’s return to big-screen science fiction

The film marked Spielberg’s return to the genre that helped make him one of Hollywood’s defining directors. Disclosure Day is his first sci-fi action film since Ready Player One in 2018, and before that, War of the Worlds in 2005.

It also reaches back toward the warmer, stranger territory of his earlier work, especially films like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The focus is not just on aliens arriving, but on what contact does to ordinary people before the rest of the world catches up.

That is where Margaret’s storyline carries its weight. It is not just a plot device for solving alien puzzles. It asks what it would mean to know someone instantly, including the parts they would rather keep hidden. A standard superhero power, this is not.

What comes with the physical release

The Aug. 25 physical release includes several extras about the making of the film.

  • A 50-minute documentary titled Encountering the Unknown: Inside Disclosure Day
  • Behind-the-scenes interviews with Steven Spielberg, Emily Blunt, and the wider cast
  • A featurette on Spielberg’s long-running collaboration with composer John Williams
  • more material on the film’s production and creative choices

Williams composed the score for Disclosure Day, continuing one of the most recognizable director-composer partnerships in modern film. For a movie so interested in awe, dread, and people staring meaningfully at the sky, that partnership is not exactly incidental.

For now, viewers can rent the film digitally. Anyone waiting for the full home-video package, and the extra explanation around Margaret’s powers, can pick it up on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, or DVD starting Aug. 25.