Thank heavens for cinema, that light in the darkness and the source of all shocking scoops. It tells us to wake up and take action before it’s too late. That we live in the Matrix. That the CIA killed JFK. That our spouse is a robot and our boss an Andromedan. Also that there is an Escher-style staircase beneath the Tokyo subway and a disembodied zombie leg stalking the hook-up parks of Brazil.
How might we react if a trusted friend said all this? Would we be entertained or appalled, enlightened or freaked out? Would we even regard them as a trusted friend any more?
“People have a right to know the truth,” declares the young whistleblower in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, a line that echoes a thousand other whistleblowers. As played by Josh O’Connor, heroic Daniel Kellner has a backpack of state secrets that incontrovertibly prove the existence of aliens and points to a sinister government cover-up. Disclosure Day is fiction, but it hints at insider knowledge. The 79-year-old director – the most trusted brand in Hollywood – even appears in the trailer to vouch for the film’s authenticity. He splices himself amid the crop circles and spacecraft, commenting on the action like an authoritative news anchor. He says: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful for people to know that all of this is true?”
We are not alone, Spielberg tells us – and neither, for that matter, is his film. Disclosure Day is merely the biggest and splashiest in a wave of paranoid conspiracy tales that recall the 1970s heyday of The Parallax View, Soylent Green, Capricorn One and The Conversation. These modern-day descendants tell different stories and wander down different rabbit holes. But they all speak the language of alienation and mistrust and seem to be groping towards a revelatory final truth.
In Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, it’s the conviction that the world’s millionaire elite are literal aliens in disguise. In Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, it’s the fevered speculation over the sexual kinks of the neighbours. In the forthcoming Wild Horse Nine, it’s the dark buried treasure of the US’s cold war past. Martin McDonagh’s comedy-thriller casts Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as a pair of CIA veterans, spinning their wheels on Easter Island as they prepare for their next super-secret assignment. “Do you ever get paranoid that you’re not being paranoid enough?” asks Malkovich at one point. It’s a rhetorical question. Metaphorically or otherwise, everyone is wearing tinfoil hats.
Is this a trend? Are all these pictures related? Common sense, our trusted friend, tells us that life is random and arbitrary and that we’re mostly making it up as we go along. But the conspiracy theory is like a seductive interloper, sidling up to assure us that, actually, that’s not true at all. Everything is connected, part of a grand design. “There are no coincidences, honey,” explains the wild-eyed dad in the new Netflix thriller The Truthers. These bizarre productions, therefore, are all here for a reason. They have a message for us, if we would only shut up and listen.
“I found a place,” whispers Chiwetel Ejiofor, who plays the furniture salesman in the mesmerising Backrooms. He can’t be more specific, because the place is a mystery and doesn’t appear on any map. It’s a system of corridors and office spaces, simultaneously sterile and sickly, that has been hiding in plain sight. If you believe the credits, Backrooms was directed by the then 20-year-old Kane Parsons, who road-tested the concept as a popular web series. If you believe wilder sections of the fanbase, it was shadow-directed by Osgood Perkins, its 52-year-old producer. The film is a locked-box mystery, a teasing riddle to solve. Therefore, it must be keeping at least one secret of its own.
Backrooms is the best kind of paranoid conspiracy tale, because it never feels the need to fill in all the blanks. It’s scary, strange and unashamedly confounding. It’s also purely cinematic, a ready-made metaphor. The backrooms sit behind an illuminated window or a screen. They might be the movies, or TikTok, or the internet’s darker corners. “It’s like a maze,” marvels Ejiofor, after he has pushed at the hinge and made his first foray inside. “It just goes on and on.”
No one ever went broke underestimating the public’s intelligence, HL Mencken used to say. But they also rarely lost money underestimating its capacity for wonder. Cinema audiences crave magic and spectacle, information and comfort. A 2024 poll suggested that 61% of Americans believe in ghosts, 57% in aliens and 70% in the devil. A sizeable minority also believes that it has been lied to by a shadowy unaccountable elite. According to a YouGov survey, 18% think the 1969 moon landing was faked, 20% that Covid vaccines contain microchips and 29% that voting machines were programmed to switch ballots in the 2020 US elections. Put enough of these niche interests together, of course, and they will eventually tip the scale. According to a 2024 study by the CHIP50 project, 78.6% of US citizens agree with at least one conspiracy theory. That’s a big, booming market for tall tales and snake oil.
Set during Covid, Ari Aster’s Eddington casts Joaquin Phoenix as a small-town sheriff who runs to be mayor. He’s an anti-mask libertarian who loves his country, hates Black Lives Matter and sports a banner on his car that reads, “YOUR [sic] BEING MANIPULATED”. As such, he’s emblematic of a conspiracy culture that has come in from the cold – that has been mainstreamed by social media and weaponised by the far right. Eddington satirises that world, but it is a symptom of it as well.
The films of the 70s effectively formed the resistance. They were an outright rejection of tired government messaging, built in fiery opposition to failed and shonky institutions. I’m not sure the same can be said for the films of today. The culture is too cloudy and the news too full of flak. No modern-day film-maker, perhaps, speaks the language of the conspiracy thriller better and louder than the White House itself. Donald Trump rails against the deep state from behind the Resolute desk and affects common cause with a dispossessed public. These people are right to demand vengeance on the establishment crooks who oppress them. But they can trust no one but him, their protector, the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief.
“Flood the zone with shit,” says Steve Bannon, the president’s sometime strategist and svengali. Stage-managed intrigue can serve as a welcome distraction, or a cover for incompetence. Disinformation keeps voters befuddled and exhausted.
The best conspiracy tales point the way to the exit door, which means freedom, which is good. But the genre’s thunder has been stolen and the way ahead isn’t clear. Bugonia is a fine film and Backrooms is better still. Both, though, feel like offshoots of the Trump Cinematic Universe, substantively not so different from the lurid fan theories that claim that Jim Carrey sent his clone to the César awards and that Eyes Wide Shut was a warning about Jeffrey Epstein.
In the US, Disclosure Day dovetailed with the White House’s nothingburger dump of declassified UFO files (“extremely interesting and important,” Trump said). This led to online speculation that the release dates had been coordinated as part of the same mutually beneficial campaign. Not true, Spielberg said; just more wild theorising. His film was emphatically not in cahoots with the Trump administration.
Are all of these red-pill productions connected? Tangentially, of course, yes. Is there a grand design? Almost certainly not. Films are kneejerk responses to the outside world. They pick up on its tensions and pander to public interest, like the medicine shows that once roamed the backwoods in search of fresh business. Conspiracy theories provide the illusion of order and control. They offer the reassurance of a story; the sense that life makes sense. This is another way of saying that they are a fabrication, a lie. What’s more upsetting: to think that the government is hiding aliens or to accept that they’re not? What’s scarier: to believe that aliens want to talk to us or to imagine that they never will?
Are we being paranoid enough? Thomas Pynchon – the unofficial laureate of the conspiracy genre – identifies a condition that is still worse than paranoia: an anti-paranoiac state in which nothing connects to anything else, where there is no lock to unpick or shining truth to uncover. It is a condition, he says, “not many of us can bear for too long”. People need plot twists and cliffhangers, teases and reveals. Spielberg is a past master and surely knows this already. So do Lanthimos and Aster and the 20-year-old director of Backrooms. So, too, does Trump.