Why I Think Disclosure Day is About Childhood Sexual Abuse
Alien Abductions as Sexual Violence
Warnings: MASSIVE spoilers for Disclosure Day (2026). And obviously, discussion of childhood sexual abuse.
You might consider this a cop out, but I don’t think Disclosure Day is only about childhood sexual abuse. Obviously, it’s about many things: empathy, faith, humanity, car chases, the power of broadcast journalism. But the core wound of our central characters, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), dates back to a single traumatic event both experienced at the ages of six and ten respectively.
From the moment we met Margaret in her Kansas City loft, it’s clear that she’s struggled throughout her life - bouncing from city to city, unable to settle down in any one place, dragging her shitty boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) behind her as she looks for something she cannot find. Later, it’s revealed that she has recurring nightmares of a then unknown traumatic event: a Hansel & Gretl style cottage, forest animals, even singing Disney songs in her sleep.
Daniel’s struggled too, in even more self destructive ways. He partied throughout college and flunked out, before spending nineteen months in federal prison for vague “cyber crimes”. He’s felt detached from humanity for at least fifteen years. Most alarmingly, neither one of them have any memories of their childhoods, Daniel not at all, Margaret unable to remember anything that occurred before the age of ten.
These are all classic signs of PTSD. They have other symptoms as well - they both experience emotional flashbacks anytime they lock eyes with an animal, freezing in place, unable to look away until the animal does. Margaret experiences a full blown traditional flashback after a particularly traumatic car chase, having maybe the most realistic panic attack ever put to screen (sorry, Puss in Boots) as she relives a still unknown traumatic event, compounded with a fear of inheriting her father’s Parkinson’s. And because this is a Spielberg movie (with Margaret serving as an avatar for his mother, Daniel for his father), only the power of music is able to pull her out of it, of course.
They end up at a warehouse where Hugo (Colman Domingo) has painstakingly recreated Margaret’s childhood home and bedroom down to the very last detail, as if he’s Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal. But he hasn’t done so to rehearse a future event. No, Hugo is looking toward the past, ready to send Margaret and by association, Daniel, into exposure therapy.
We finally learn what has bonded Margaret and Daniel together all these years: an alien abduction that gave them both latent powers, Daniel’s triggered long before the narrative starts, Margaret’s triggered in Act One. But it’s their reaction to reliving this memory that’s most interesting to me. They both panic beforehand, unwilling to remember, and later sob during, Daniel at one point pleading with the vision of ten-year-old Emily not to get out of bed and follow the aliens disguised as forest animals. But of course, Daniel can’t change the past.
In a movie where the aliens are presented as benevolent, it’s interesting that this abduction is presented as the traumatic event that has defined Daniel and Margaret’s whole lives, even without them knowing it. An image of the aliens holding their mouths open while they’re unable to move still haunts me. It’s undoubtedly a violation of personal boundaries.
Aliens have been used to represent sexual violence before, most notably in the Alien franchise and Mysterious Skin, less notably throughout season five of Riverdale. What’s new this time though is that the aliens themselves are not part of this metaphor - just the abduction. Daniel and Margaret are “experiencers”, which in another world might be called “survivors”. Aliens in Disclosure Day are a beautiful possibility, as long as you’re not abducted by them. It’s not so different from sex, really.
Unlike alien abductions in Disclosure Day, childhood sexual abuse is unfortunately not rare, with research indicating as many as one out of four girls and one out of six boys experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of eighteen. Victims of sexual violence are four times more likely to develop PTSD by adulthood. In real life, some researchers argue that memories of alien abductions are actually repressed memories of sexual trauma.
As things the Epstein files slowly come out and the Catholic Church scandal continues on, it’s becoming more and more clear that we live in a world that is haunted by childhood sexual abuse. One in four/one in six are incredibly high numbers and that’s just in America. How would the world change if we actually confronted the fact that children are so often sexually abused, almost always by someone they know personally. The truth is out there, the disclosure has already been made. But now, it’s time to listen.
Thank you. Finally found another person who thought of this.