Up and Down

The movies I’m writing about today took a while to show up, but now that they’re here it turns out they’re perfectly aligned with one another. Disclosure Day and Backrooms opened theatrically within weeks of each other earlier this spring, and landed on disc a week apart. They’re both about people pushing through obstacles to find a truth that’s been hidden from us all. Some of the obstacles are physical; others, not so much. Those are even creepier.

Let’s start with Disclosure Day. Obviously, any new Steven Spielberg movie about ordinary people dealing with the possibility of extraterrestrial alien contact is going to form an unofficial trilogy with his early masterworks Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T; there’s no getting around the fact that Spielberg more or less defined the genre with those two films, offering an ultimately hopeful vision of communication that still had room for terror, awe and spectacular chase scenes. Disclosure Day just takes things a little further, wondering what would happen if the stakes weren’t personal but global. What if it was time for everyone to find out what Roy Neary and the Taylor family stumbled upon?

Disclosure Day does things a little differently, mostly unfolding from the perspective of the people on the inside rather than the outside. The first person we meet is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s stolen some very valuable material from his employer, Wardex, He’s no one, just an IT guy, but for whatever reason he’s found himself at the center of a massive, decades-long conspiracy to suppress evidence of alien life on Earth. And Wardex is pissed enough about that to have kidnapped his girlfriend, Jean (Eve Hewson), offering to trade her for the things in Daniel’s possession.

It doesn’t go so well, triggering a cat-and-mouse chase across half of the Midwest as the beetle-browed CEO of Wardex (Colin Firth) dispatches his endless fleet of black-clad goons to hunt the couple down as they flee from one hideout to the next at the direction of the apparently all-knowing Hugo (Colman Domingo), who’s keeping Daniel safe while he finishes some sort of construction project.

These aren’t the only people on a collision course with destiny: In Kansas City (the Missouri one), TV meteorologist Margaret Fairchild has suddenly found herself able to speak any language, and see into the souls of anyone in front of her. It’s a gift of empathy she can neither understand nor control, and it peaks when she starts uttering a string of incomprehensible clicks and gurgles live on camera. This understandably freaks out both her colleagues and her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell), a reasonable guy who’s about to experience some very unreasonable things. It isn’t long before Wardex is after them too.

Disclosure Day appears to follow the structure of Close Encounters, with both the characters and the story hurtling towards some mysterious revelation. Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp work with incredible economy, dropping us into a story that’s already underway and trusting us to figure out where everything fits. It’s not difficult, because all the breadcrumbs are there: Daniel expected to be a courier, not a fugitive; Margaret didn’t want any of this.

But they both have things in their past that they’ve chosen to hide from their partners, and maybe they aren’t as unprepared for this as they believe. And as the world races closer to spinning off its axis – did I mention there’s a terrifying military buildup in Korea that could escalate to a nuclear exchange between superpowers? – Koepp and Spielberg slowly turn up the tension while also introducing other, more ambivalent elements. Something else is going on here, coming together in the background.

Have I already spoiled the movie by referencing Close Encounters and E.T.? Does anyone believe a Steven Spielberg film would end with the annihilation of all humanity? He’s toyed with nihilism and dread for his entire career, but always chosen another path. He’s an optimist, hopeful that the human race can save itself, but still wondering whether it’ll ever understand that. That’s why Disclosure Day land likes such a strange, beautiful gift after the back-to-back triumphs of West Side Story and The Fabelmans; it’s a movie like they used to make, “they” being “Steven Spielberg.”

Sure, he’s a veteran showing us how he’s adapted to modern cinematic tech – there are at least two thrown-away shots here that he’s clearly been waiting to do since at least 1989, but couldn’t for fear of killing his crew – but he’s also demonstrating that big genre blockbusters don’t have to be predictable or mechanical. There’s a gloriously human confusion in Blunt’s performance as Margaret that slowly gives way to certainty; it’s mirrored in the way O’Connor fumbles and panics as the overmatched Daniel, who already knows all of Wardex’ secrets but wishes he didn’t.

Firth’s baddie is kind of a two-dimensional suit, but the actor finds little ways to show us he’s not a total robot, just a man with misplaced priorities. And Domingo is similarly able to invest Hugo with the warmth and confidence of a true believer: All evidence to the contrary, he’s sure everything’s going to turn out fine. Today’s the day.

I wasn’t surprised that Spielberg keeps an eye out for small, charmingly human moments within a gargantuan narrative; they’re part of his toolkit, and at this point Janusz Kamiński knows exactly how to capture those moments, and John Williams knows just how to score them. But I was surprised by the way he eschews a big climactic chase to simply roll into the final movement of the film, delivering a conclusion driven by awe and wonder rather than action and momentum. I don’t know what would happen if humanity received incontrovertible proof of extraterrestrial life, and I don’t think he or Koepp do either. But I do think this is how it would start, and when Disclosure Day reaches its apex, it’s everything I hoped it would be.

Speaking of which, I really hope Universal runs Courtney Grace for a supporting-actress Oscar. That’s the best performance I’ve seen all year.

Universal’s 4K/Blu-ray combo of Disclosure Day offers reference-quality presentations of the feature in both 2160p and 1080p, with Dolby Atmos audio on both discs. A BD-only release is also available, but the 4K master is a stunner, with a careful HDR grade to make sure Kamiński’s signature lighting scheme is just as stark and intense as it was in cinemas.

There are just two special features – one long, and one very short – but they’re essential. “Encountering the Unknown: Inside Disclosure Day” is a nuts-and-bolts making-of, with producer-director Laurent Bouzereau given an all-access pass to document the production from start to finish. He’s been working with Spielberg since the LaserDisc days, and the filmmaker is clearly comfortable talking to him, but so is everyone else; the doc runs just under an hour and engages not just with the practical challenges of making this very ambitious thriller, but also the ideas driving it and its place in Spielberg’s filmography. It’s a pleasure to watch.

Running just four minutes, “Spielberg and Willams: A Legendary Collaboration” is all about honoring Williams, scoring his 30^th Spielberg feature. (Saluting his friend at a little party to mark the occasion, the director is quick to point out all the television work they did as well.) It probably could have fit into the larger documentary, but given that this is likely to be the last time the pair works together – Williams is 94, and looking very frail these days – it deserves its own spot on the disc.

Now we go down into the inner darkness of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, a feature-length expansion of the director’s creepypasta-inspired YouTube series, which milked a very specific queasiness from characters wandering through an inexplicably endless series of hallways and rooms. And true to the brand, the Backrooms movie opens with a first-person walkthrough of that very same space, from the point of view of a character who’s lost and terrified of … something. It ends with a jump scare, as all found-footage horror must. The film will spend the next 105 minutes chasing the same high.

That said, the first half of Backrooms has an undeniable pull, introducing us to Chiwetel Ejiofor as frustrated furniture salesman Clark and Renate Reinsve as his equally frustrated therapist, Dr. Kline, whose lives are cluttered with baggage long before Clark discovers a weird portal into the Backrooms in the basement of his strip-mall establishment. Having trained as an architect, Clark is fascinated by the impossible geography of the space; being a therapist, Dr. Kline can only conclude the maps he’s drawing are the work of a mind in distress. But after Clark enlists his assistant manager Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend (Finn Bennett) to help him document the mystery, Dr. Kline finds herself drawn into the phenomenon as well.

You may have noticed that the cast is, shall we say, overqualified for a high-concept horror project. It’s to Parsons’ credit (and A24’s production savvy) that two Oscar nominees would sign on to something so amorphous, and that even the incidental roles of Kat and Bobby could attract actors with the dramatic chops of Maxwell and Bennett. (Mark Duplass is also around, as a guy who watches monitors.) They collectively give Backrooms more depth than it would otherwise offer, even as things start drifting away from unnerving and into the familiar.

The strength and weakness of the Backrooms movie are one and the same – the uncanny space in which almost all the action takes place is inherently disturbing, and watching gifted actors grope their way through an industrial floorplan that ought to make sense but never quite does is consistently unsettling. But it’s also visually and narratively monotonous, with Will Soodik’s screenplay doubling back on itself to pad out a paper-thin story and explain things that shouldn’t be explained at all.

But maybe it’s better not to understand the experience. Consider the itchy unknowability of Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, or even the cold, unforgiving cycles of Genki Kawamura’s videogame adaptation Exit 8, two movies that strand the audience in nightmares and refuse to let go. Backrooms seems more intent on launching a lo-fi franchise than following you home.

Arriving on disc a full month ahead of its streaming debut – which feels like a big deal, somehow – the 4K edition of Backrooms offers an extremely faithful representation of the movie’s deliberately limited palette and subtly disquieting soundtrack presented here in DTS-HD 5.1, rather than Dolby Atmos. (A Blu-ray is also available.)

Elevation’s discs also offer some, but not all, of the supplemental suite that will appear on A24’s boutique release: An audio commentary with Parsons, sound designer Eugenio Battaglia, visual-effects supervisor Edward J. Douglas and Parson’s co-composer Edo Van Breemen; breakdowns of two key sequences – the prologue and a death scene – with commentary by visual-effects supervisor Douglas and associate visual-effects supervisor Calvin Romey, and the half-hour “Building the Backrooms” production featurette, which is considerably glossier than the movie and lets the actors glam up a little for their interview segments.

A24’s 4K and Blu-ray discs, which are now shipping (but which I have yet to receive), will include additional extras and those boutique postcards, which I expect will be super-weird this time around. Elevation’s discs are considerably cheaper even before the exchange, and of course also include French audio and subtitles. Maybe that extra level of dissonance will make the experience even creepier.

Disclosure Day is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment; Backrooms is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Elevation Pictures in Canada, and A24 in the US.

Up next: Danger: Diabolik, Auntie Mame, I’ll Do Anything and The People vs. Larry Flynt lead this month’s catalogue harvest.