Sydney Sweeney in Reality, based on the case of the former NSA translator Reality Winner.
Reality (M, 83 mins) Streaming on Neon
Directed by Tina Satter
Reviewed by Jen Shieff
Archived audio and transcripts of court cases add authenticity to crime stories, words that have actually been spoken make for gripping drama when there’s terrific direction and acting as in Reality.
Tina Satter’s debut as director is the film of her verbatim play, Is This a Room? about NSA-contracted translator and US Air Force veteran, Reality Leigh Winner.
The play is based on the FBI’s transcript of an interview in 2017 that took place in Reality’s rented house in Atlanta, Georgia. The question “Is This a Room?” was asked by one of the oafish FBI team when searching the house.
The story begins with Reality (Sydney Sweeney), an apparently ordinary young woman, arriving home from shopping in her nondescript car, pulling up on an unkempt lawn where she’s startled by a man knocking on her car’s window.
Turns out, the FBI have been lying in wait.
At first, there’s just two of them - Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis) - then a couple of large black vehicles block any hope she might have had of escape. What has Reality done?
In the gradual unfolding of Reality’s life, informal questioning beginning before they even go inside, it’s revealed that she has a cross-fit training regime, teaches yoga, loves her two pets, owns an AK-50 and a Glock, all treated as normal.
But once the interrogation continues more secretly inside, it emerges that while working as a translator of Farsi, Dari and Pashto, she’s also, possibly, been mishandling classified information.
Eventually, Reality is charged with the same offence that Donald Trump was charged with, over documents he’d kept at Mar-a Lago: violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
Motivated to punish the United States Government for injustices such as Trump’s sacking of FBI director James Comey, an event which we see in Fox News footage opening and closing the doco-drama, Reality does four years in jail.
Sweeney does an excellent job of showing Reality’s hidden depths, at once unassuming, co-operative, humble and hesitant, possibly devious but basically honest, and yet on a mission of sorts.
She shows no sign of the snarky, rude aspects of her recent character, the manipulative Olivia Mossbacher from The White Lotus Season 1, memorably rude to her parents and brother.
The agents are deceptively kind, questioning with fixed smiles and showing supposed interest in Reality as a person, while the tension in the air, Garrick’s pauses, his annoying coughing, which seems ever so genuine, makes it impossible to stop watching for a second.
An arrest seems inevitable, the FBI seem to have all the evidence they need.
There’s clearly catastrophe ahead for Reality, whose final querulous, “Am I going to Jail tonight” isn’t said fearfully, it’s just the question of an animal lover who has a dog and cat to think about.
Was Reality justified in doing what she called protecting the American people, or was she a traitor? Or is she just a person with unusual interests, getting on with her life as best she can? Over to you. Highly recommended.
★★★★
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