Tina Satter adapts her own play into a chamber drama powered by Sydney Sweeney’s performance as NSA whistleblower Reality Winner.
When the unbelievably named Reality Winner printed out a classified intelligence report revealing Russian interference in the 2016 US election from her National Security Agency work computer and mailed it to the newsroom of The Intercept, she, “wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she said. An American linguist who served in the Air Force before taking up a translating job with an NSA contractor, Winner merely wanted her employer to stop broadcasting Fox News in the office all day. And she wanted right wing politicians and commentators to stop lying to the American public.
Tina Satter adapts her own play ‘Is This a Room’ for her feature film debut, a chamber drama that, as with its theatrical counterpart, takes the entirety of its dialogue verbatim from the transcripts of Winner’s 2017 FBI interrogation at her home in Augusta, Georgia. It’s a neat device that highlights both the intensity and the farce of the investigation against her, and refutes the very kind of narrative fabrication that Winner found so troubling.
Sydney Sweeney stars as Winner alongside Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the FBI agents who, over a fraught 83 minutes, engage in a game of evasion, neither side comprehending what the other already knows. There is an ambiguity to Winner who is constructed through specific details – her bumper stickers, her yellow low top Converse sans laces, her pink semi-automatic rifle – but is performed as erratic and twitchy, strangely distant except when it comes to the safety of her pets.
Perhaps that’s how anyone would act if federal agents came knocking, but Sweeney’s depiction also serves as a way to build uncertainty around the character and then, ultimately, to avoid defining her in the way that the American media would in the days after the security breach. Her supposed act of espionage brought her the longest sentence ever imposed for a crime of this sort and a torrent of media abuse focused on her actions and not the implications of the document she shared.
Satter is adept at building tension but also opts for clumsier, more gimmicky formal choices that derail some of the film’s efficacy. A repeated image of sound waves to interrupt the interrogations in Winner’s home is an unnecessary reminder of the broader audio conceit that has already been established, and a visual censoring effect that cuts Winner from the frame any time she says something that had been redacted from the transcript feels a little excessive. The film’s strengths lie in the way it uses a government’s own document to expose its failings; not only are the agents often bumbling and misogynistic in their approach, but the question remains as to why the NSA made it so easy for employees to create physical copies of top secret information.
Were it not for the transcripts, Reality would be a more straightforward addition to the already-oversaturated true crime genre. Satter’s handling of the material and Sweeney’s performance, however, bring this into a more intriguing space where questions of narrative truth, perception and the punishment for honesty are addressed.
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
Published 31 May 2023
Tina Satter adapts her own play, which uses a real whistleblower interrogation as its source.
Sydney Sweeney grabs this role by the throat, hooking on to the nuances of the text.
A few little gimmicks go a long way to diminish the dramatic purity of this intriguing project.
The star of Tina Satter's whistleblowing drama Reality speaks about the challenges of playing a real person and the concept of the modern movie star.
The documentary filmmaker reflects on her relationship with Nan Goldin and the ways in which art can serve as a vessel for activism.
Laura Poitras’ real-life spy thriller shows how and why Edward Snowden stepped up to blow the whistle on government spying.
Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.
