Reality

Reality Winner isn't the title of a shitty TV game show, or a victor of one such mess. It's actually the name of a Pashto language expert who was arrested by the FBI for 'mishandling classified documents' in 2017.

It starts with a dialogue-free locked off wide shot of a woman at her desk in an office with, crucially, Fox news showing a clip of FBI director Comey's sacking on wall mounted TVs. Cut to a number of days later and we see Winner, played with wet-eyed anxiety by Sydney Sweeney, heading home after grocery shopping.

On her arrival home, she gets a knock on her car window, and here's where the film begins its unusually constrained method of using only the recorded transcript of her 'interrogation' as dialogue. This works surprisingly well and there are even a number of gimmicky shocks when redacted material is mentioned. It's a neat way of working, presumably a cheap way also, and it stands as more of a docu-drama record of this part of recent history than a particularly gripping modern political thriller.

The first third of the film consists of not much more than an extended sequence of awkward small talk. The FBI agents don't really do anything wrong, in fact, they're extremely 'by the book'. It's just a shame this 'book' is so badly written. The main pair of agents, Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis) bend over backwards to be kind and fair, and it's this veiled threat that keeps the film ticking along. It's only after chatting about her pets, and over-explaining how they're planning to go about things that they get to the point of their visit. This is outlined to Reality in an empty room at the back of her house and the ugly sparseness of the setting drives home her creeping dread. Incidentally, co-writer/director Tina Satter based the film on her own play, titled 'Is This a Room'.

The film reminds us that all the dialogue is official transcript by popping waveform and script page graphics up on screen now and again. Fair dues to the cast for resolutely sticking to said (trans)script, even down to misspoken instructions and coughing. Sweeney illustrates Reality's diminishing confidence with aplomb, while Hamilton and Davis are utterly believable as regular fellas tied to a toxic government's regulations. A small scale Snowden, a minor Assange, but Reality joins this sub-sub-genre and manages to maintain the rage and the curiosity too.

Reality opens at Luna cinemas and Event cinemas on June 29th.

See also:

Speaking of Assange and Snowden, there are two notable pairs of films about each of them, one doco and one drama. Assange is covered in Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (2013) and Bill Condon's The Fifth Estate (also 2013). Snowden has Laura Poitras's Citizenfour (2014) and Oliver Stone's Snowden (2016).