Reality film review — verbatim drama tells a momentous true story

“How’s your day today? Well, all right!” So goes the dialogue in the crackerjack new film Reality, a momentous true story told in chit-chat. Of course, the title is different. Hard to stop that sounding loaded. Even the simplest explanation seems unlikely. It is actually the name of the protagonist: Reality Winner.

You may recall her from a 2017 news story. Winner was then 25, a translator with the US National Security Agency, charged with leaking a classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. She is played by Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria). The film concerns Winner’s arrest. If you see a better movie this year, consider yourself blessed.

Typically, the US whistleblower arrives on screen one of two ways. Edward Snowden starred in a fine documentary, Citizenfour. Julian Assange got a clunky dramatisation, The Fifth Estate. Here, director Tina Satter’s approach is stark and novel: more literal than documentary, more eloquent than drama. Every word comes verbatim from recordings of the interrogation before the arrest. Complete with flubs and non-sequiturs, it has the disorientating quality that only comes with, yes, the absolutely real.

That sense of something scrambled sets in as soon as Winner returns from grocery shopping to her bungalow in Augusta, Georgia. Outside, she is greeted by FBI agents in chinos and polo shirts. (They are played by Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton.) It takes a moment to place their tone: the cheery efficiency of customer service. There is deodorised small talk about CrossFit; a smiling promise to “figure all this out”. The “this” is as yet non-specific.

What follows is a study of language and power so filled with weaponised niceties that Harold Pinter would have been proud to write it. Inside the house, the register stays wilfully bland, until it doesn’t. Words are stretched to the far reaches of their meaning. This interview, the agents stress, is “voluntary”. The result, should Winner opt out, goes unspoken, like the tension between the Casual Friday vibe and the dawning gravity of the situation. (Is it a spoiler to say Winner later served five years and three months in federal prison?)

In what is technically an espionage thriller, there are no chases through underground car parks. Instead, absurdism and menace coexist. (Agents are much preoccupied with Winner’s cat.) But while the Bureau controls this reality, the film wrestles a measure back.

Winner will be accused of exposing US intelligence “sources and methods”. Satter has those too. Before it was a film, Reality was a stage play, titled Is This A Room. Now, the translation into cinema makes brilliant use of an everyday tool: the camera, whose agility and jarring close-ups endlessly accent and heighten. And if you notice the artifice, well, that feels like the plan. Isn’t all this theatre on the part of the FBI? (A word for the actors: in a film where pauses speak volumes, Davis and Hamilton are skilled and Sweeney stellar.)

But the ultimate reality the title refers to is, of course, the actual case behind the euphemisms. In polarised America, any film about the Trump-phobic Winner might seem partisan. But Reality is not that. Instead, it is a stark X-ray of state power both deeply tied to the present moment and the timeless dread of the knock at the door. Fittingly, it takes Winner to finally crack the code. “Am I going to jail tonight?” she asks. And the agents briefly fluster, lost without their script.

★★★★★

In UK cinemas from June 2 and streaming on Max in the US now