Sydney Sweeney graduates from TV to movies (though still, at least in the US, under the HBO branding banner) with great aplomb in Reality, starring in Tina Satter’s fascinating cinema verité debut – based on her own play – telling the story of the interrogation and arrest of Reality Winner entirely through verbatim readings of the recorded FBI transcript. It’s a tense and sometimes chilling look at how power works in the US legal system, even when this power is executed through people who are themselves anxious to escape from the awkward situations that it forces them into.
Sweeney plays Reality, who received the longest ever custodial sentence for leaking classified material to the media, across one incredibly stressful day on June 3 2017. Having printed out and mailed a classified report on Russian interference in the 2016 US election a couple of weeks earlier from her NSA contractor job, she’s visited by the FBI as she returns home from doing the grocery shopping. Though there are eventually a lot of agents at her house, Reality spends all her time talking to two – the more affable Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and the slightly jumpier Agent Taylor (Marchant Davis).
All three give really solid performances in difficult roles – everything down to the stutters and coughs in Satter and co-writer James Paul Dallas’s script is taken directly from the transcript, but they manage to avoid it feeling drab or stale – but Sweeney is particularly excellent. Moving from bewildered to anxious to defeated to eventually accepting, she fully inhabits a woman whose life is falling apart minute by minute. Given what we know about US policing, perhaps the biggest surprise across Reality is how politely the whole thing is handled; no one raises their voice throughout the film and everyone from Reality to a couple of the no-name grunts searching her house seems genuinely concerned about the welfare of her pets.
It is an inescapably stagy film, but Satter uses this to create a genuinely discomforting sense of claustrophobia as Reality attempts to figure out exactly how much trouble she’s in while avoiding saying anything incriminating – Reality runs at barely over 80 minutes but is still effectively exhausting by the end. It’s very tense stuff, to the point where Reality’s eventual confession comes as almost a relief, allowing everyone to speak more directly and less cagily. To keep things cinematic, Satter does come up with a few intriguing visual tricks – whenever there’s a redacted line in the transcript, the person talking disappears from screen with a sort of video glitch effect, creating a welcome sense of the uncanny in this otherwise resolutely realistic film.
Though the final five minutes are a bit too grandiose compared to what’s come before, Reality is a fantastic film debut for Satter, taking a premise that could have felt gimmick-y or even robotic and imbuing it with a queasy, sweaty humanity, centred on a revelatory performance from Sweeney.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 