More a piece of performance art than a narrative film, director and co-writer Tina Satter's adaptation of her 2019 stage play Is This a Room is conceptually intriguing but dramatically detached. Its revised title Reality refers to the unlikely actual name of protagonist Reality Winner (played here by Spokane native Sydney Sweeney), but it also reflects the movie's deliberate distortion of source material that's meant to represent the unvarnished truth.
As an opening title card indicates, all of the dialogue in Reality is drawn verbatim from the transcript of the FBI's recorded interrogation with Winner in June 2017. Yet by repeatedly calling attention to the movie's origins in official documents, Satter only further distances the audience from the characters' immediate circumstances. She delivers something closer to a re-enactment, in which the artificiality is always apparent.
The actors put in strong efforts to counteract that artificiality, but they're also constrained by Satter's rigid formalism. Every stutter, cough and pause is reproduced faithfully from the transcript, without room for alteration. Sweeney, known for provocative roles on HBO series Euphoria and The White Lotus, captures Winner's awkwardness and growing dread as she arrives home from grocery shopping to discover FBI agents at her home in Augusta, Georgia. Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis play the lead agents as deceptively friendly and ingratiating, with threats looming behind every smile and greeting.
An Air Force veteran fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, Winner was working as a translator for a civilian contractor to the NSA when she came across a classified document revealing possible Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. She printed that document and sent it to political website The Intercept, and the FBI tracked the leak back to her within a few weeks. Winner's arrest and subsequent conviction, with the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified documents to the media, was a major news story, but anyone who doesn't remember all the details may have a hard time discerning the significance of various exchanges.
Even so, the banal menace of the FBI interrogation, which takes place primarily in a dingy back room at Winner's house, is disturbing on its own, regardless of the details of the crime that Winner is accused of. Dressed like an unfashionable suburban dad, Hamilton conveys the disingenuous chumminess of the agent who knows exactly what he wants from Winner and won't give up until he wears her down.
He's scarier than the more overtly imposing Davis, who spends much of his time silently glowering. There's a sense of unease even to their early small talk, before Winner understands the seriousness of the situation, as they help her secure her pets before agents search her house, and ask mundane questions about her gym routine and neighborhood interactions. They overemphasize how much they love dogs, with performative concern for the welfare of Winner's animals.
All of that unfolds more or less as it might have onstage, with occasional insert shots breaking up the straightforward conversations. Satter adds more stylized touches as the movie goes on, though, especially when the transcript gets to any redacted portions, which she interprets by having the characters literally disappear from the screen. Throughout the movie, she periodically cuts to the text of the transcript or to what looks like playback of an audio file, breaking the potential immersion in the tense, weighted interactions.
Reality ends with a heavy-handed montage of news coverage and commentary, overcompensating for its previous obtuseness by spelling out exactly what Winner faced following her arrest. There's no more meaningful context in those bloviating talking heads than there is in the arch chamber piece that precedes them. ♦
REALITY
