Emily Blunt Is Getting Oscar Buzz Already for New Spielberg Film
Steven Spielberg's new sci-fi thriller Disclosure Day doesn't open until June 12. The early reactions are already in, and everyone seems to be talking about the same person.
Emily Bluntplays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City television meteorologist who, in the film's pivotal opening scene, loses the ability to speak on live air, overtaken by something extraterrestrial and entirely unexplainable. It is, by multiple accounts, one of the more electric character introductions in recent Spielberg memory. Collider's Steven Weintraub, who saw the film ahead of its official opening, called Blunt's work flat-out incredible and urged audiences to stop watching trailers and go in fresh. New Rockstars critic Erik Vosssaid it may be 'the best performance of her career.'
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The Mary Sue described the film as a spiritual companion to both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., noting that Blunt carries the emotional register across comedy, thriller, and something close to heartbreak, sometimes within the same scene. Critic Jairo Jiménezwrote on social media that Blunt and co-star Josh O'Connor form 'a magnetic and beautifully human couple,' calling the performances the best of both their careers.
The key scene opening scene that kicks off the mystery, in which Margaret begins speaking in a clicking, non-human language during a live weather broadcast, required Blunt to make a decision that shows how seriously she took role. On a recent episode of Hot Ones, Blunt explained that she could have taken the AI route to generate the alien sounds. She declined. 'I thought I could make some really strange sounds,' she told host Sean Evans. Instead, she went into a recording session and created the clicks, hums, and consonant patterns herself. 'I did sort of the clicking sounds, I did sort of humming sounds, consonant sounds, breathing strange sounds.' The scene, as shot, runs four minutes as a single take.
Blunt had already offered a clue about the film's existential questions in the June 2026 edition of Empire. 'There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day,' she said. That idea has increased both the fan speculation around the film's relationship to the 1977 classic and the anticipation around her specific role in it.
Blunt is already well known to audiences from The Devil Wears Prada, A Quiet Place, and her Oscar-nominated work in Oppenheimer. What the first reactions are describing is something different from any of those, a lead performance built on a character Blunt described as someone who has 'walked through life with itchy fingertips', always sensing she didn't belong where she was, until the moment she does.
Disclosure Day opens nationwide in theaters and IMAX on June 12.
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This story was originally published June 6, 2026 at 2:42 PM.