Reality

Directed by Tina Satter

Running time: 1hr25 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Sydney Sweeney in Reality

The stage play on which Reality is based had a stranger, more intriguing title: Is This a Room? It’s an abstract question applied to what is plainly a chamber piece, set between close, emphatically room-defining walls in the poky Georgia home of Reality Winner — the improbably named but very much real-life National Security Agency translator turned prominent political whistleblower, arrested and incarcerated for leaking details of Russian interference in 2016’s US presidential election. Abstract, I say, but not unreal: like everything said in playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter’s compelling dramatisation of Winner’s FBI interrogation, it’s a quote drawn verbatim from the case’s official transcripts.

It’s a rigorous approach that winds up showing how factual records can always be moulded into narrative, albeit not exactly as Hollywood would script it. When two agents (Josh Hamilton and Marchànt Davis) detain Winner in her kitchen while other feds comb her house for evidence, what ensues isn’t the taut, driving procedural you’d expect from her story, but something more eerie and discursive, its investigative momentum continually disrupted by deceptive conversational banalities — reality, even. Winner, not having been read her rights and not realising she’s on the brink of scandal, is less concerned with standing her ground than with letting the cat in; the agents chatter with her about CrossFit, pets, dating and guns — this is America, after all — whilst tacitly going in for the kill. As thrillers go, it’s not standardly thrilling, yet there’s a queasy pull to it nonetheless.

Much credit for that goes to a tensely watchful performance by Sydney Sweeney, the rising star best known for playing soured teenage princesses in TV’s The White Lotus and Euphoria, here navigating a tricky adult assignment with notable subtlety and stoicism, avoiding the look-at-me dramatic showboating that young actors often bring to such mettle-proving roles. As Winner, her slightly dour, distracted twitchiness makes her cornering by the authorities all the more disturbing. Moreover, it matches the cool, steady temperature of Satter’s surprisingly unstagy filmmaking, which embraces the possibilities of the screen for its biggest formal flourish: when the image glitches and collapses into pixels, the sound cuts out, and the transcript is quite literally redacted.

REALITY (2023) Written by Tina Satter and James Paul Dallas | Shot by Paul Yee | Edited by Jennifer Vecchiarello and Ron Dulin