movie review reality

“I knew it was secret. But I also knew I had pledged my service to the American people.” — Reality Winner

Reality Winner’s name is almost too good to be true, considering the facts of the case. The former United States Air Force member, a linguist contractor with the NSA, fluent in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, with top security clearance, and, of course, eventual whistleblower, was arrested on June 3, 2017, for printing out classified information about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and sending it to the news outlet The Intercept . Despite support from the likes of Julian Assange , Reality did not “win” in her fight against the federal government. Denied bail multiple times, Winner was sentenced to five years in prison, the longest sentence ever given for leaking classified documents. (She was released early in 2021.) 

What was startling about Reality Winner was her youth (just 25 years old), and her blonde-blue-eyed fresh-faced innocent appearance. She was a Cross Fit devotee. Her Instagram was a mashup of documenting her healthy meals and posting weight-lifting videos. It was hard to square the image with the reality. The two FBI agents who questioned her had recording devices attached to their wrists. They recorded the whole interrogation.

In 2019, Tina Satter turned the interrogation transcript into an acclaimed play, Is This A Room , which started with a run at the Vineyard Theatre in New York before moving to Broadway in 2021. The script is made up entirely of the transcript, word for word. “ Reality ,” Satter’s film adaptation of the stage play, is her directorial debut, and it’s such an impressive and unnerving piece of work. 

Sydney Sweeney plays Reality, and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis play the two FBI agents charged with figuring out what Reality did when she did it. “If” she did it isn’t a question. Winner was confronted by the agents outside her home in Augusta, Georgia, as she got out of her car after doing a grocery run. The entire questioning process occurred first on the lawn outside her house and then inside in an unfurnished back area, which—as Winner apologizes for on the tape—is dirty, and not really a room at all. She consents to the questioning. She does not ask for a lawyer.

The transcript is fascinating since it starts so casually, and Winner shows little to no confusion about why FBI agents are confronting her on her front lawn. Wouldn’t an innocent person demand to know what they think she has done? Reality is compliant. She doesn’t seem surprised they are there, although she claims she has no idea why they want to talk to her. The only thing rattling her is the thought of her pets. If the agents could please close the front door as they search her house so the cat doesn’t escape, that would be great! If she is arrested, could someone please call so-and-so to come and pick up her dog? (If you are a pet owner, this will make perfect sense.)

One could call “Reality” bare bones, which would be accurate. Most of it occurs in one room, with three people talking. There are some interesting camera angles as the questioning gets more intense, but Satter’s approach generally allows the language to take center stage. There are a couple of “flashbacks,” but they’re brief: Reality is shown sitting at her desk at work, Fox News playing on all the television screens. No attempt is made to “open up” the story. 

At first, the FBI agents display benign good-cop smiles. They just want to clear up some confusion; they have a couple of questions! They are dressed casually in khakis, Izods. They make small talk. The small talk is truly small: the weather, her groceries, her pets; she mentions lifting weights and getting ready for a competition. Some of this even feels like casual banter. Reality’s concern for the well-being of her pets is not brushed off. The agents try to assuage her concerns, although they make alarmed moves when she tries to walk toward her dog or the front door. She notices these things, their control of her movements, but remains cooperative. She is never hostile.

There are times when Satter cuts to a blank screen, with the words being said by Reality and the agents unfurling out in transcript form, underlying the word-for-word nature of the script: false starts, awkward bumbling phrases, and almost dull language. Nobody is eloquent. It’s fascinating to listen to because this is how people talk, and it’s as close as possible to how it all went down.

The redactions in the transcript are personalized and visualized in almost supernatural flashes, glitches in the Matrix, adding to the eerie feeling of a gigantic monolithic government crouched in the corner of that bare dirty room in a small house in Georgia. Everything seems real, but the tension pushes it into an almost surreal and experimental space. (Satter runs with this in a hallucinatory section where the all-male FBI team laughs at Reality’s expense.)

Sweeney, known from “ Euphoria ” and “ The White Lotus ,” might seem like a counter-intuitive casting choice, but Satter knows what she’s doing, and so does Sweeney. Sweeney plays Reality simply and unfussily. She doesn’t “play” her innocence; she doesn’t indicate Reality’s inner knowledge. There are no outbursts or impassioned political speeches. She doesn’t fall apart. When the reveal comes, as of course it does, it feels organic as opposed to dramatized. Reality did what she did for a reason; she doesn’t feel bad about it, knows she will be punished, and is ready to take her punishment. Played in a room with brutal fluorescent lighting, and no clever tricks or soundtrack or ambiance to hide behind, Sweeney gives a very impressive performance, perfectly modulated and crescendoed.

“I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” Reality tells the agents.

Considering everything that’s come to light since 2017, Reality Winner’s sentence is a reminder of the importance of whistleblowers and the dangers they face. “Reality” is a brutal film, with a short run-time and a story arc so strong it obliterates the memory of self-important complex films, weighted down with a “message,” straining for relevance. Satter’s film doesn’t need to push. “Reality” wears its relevance on its fluorescent-lit short sleeves.

On HBO Monday, May 29th.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O’Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

• Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner
• Josh Hamilton as Special Agent Garrick
• Marchánt Davis as Special Agent Taylor
• Benny Elledge as Joe
• Allan Anthony Smith as FBI Agent
• John Way as FBI Agent
• James Paul Dallas
• Tina Satter
• Jennifer Vecchiarello
• Nathan Micay

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Reality 's narrow scope and gripping fact-based story add up to a riveting showcase for Sydney Sweeney in the title role.

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Movie Review: Sydney Sweeney is brilliant in ‘Reality,’ based on true story of NSA whistleblower

This image released by HBO shows Sydney Sweeney in a scene from “Reality.” (Lily Olsen/HBO Max via AP)

This image released by HBO shows Sydney Sweeney in a scene from “Reality.” (HBO Max via AP)

This image released by HBO shows Josh Hamilton, from left, Sydney Sweeney and Marchant Davis in a scene from “Reality.” (HBO Max via AP)

This image released by HBO shows Marchant Davis, left, and Josh Hamilton in a scene from “Reality.” (HBO Max via AP)

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“Reality,” a new movie starring Sydney Sweeney, is largely set in one empty room. There is nothing on the walls. There are no chairs or rugs, just a stark and ugly room in a nondescript rental property in a downtrodden neighborhood. Its script is as minimalistic — lifted directly from the transcript of one long conversation between two FBI agents and a young woman they suspect has leaked classified documents. The dialogue has all the ums and ahs, botched sentences and awkward small talk one might expect from actual human beings, not slickly intelligent Aaron Sorkin creations. And it’s one of the most tense and exciting films of the year.

It’s based on the actual FBI interrogation of the unbelievably named Reality Winner , a former Air Force translator who worked as a contractor at a National Security Agency office in Augusta, Georgia. One day in May 2017, she printed a classified report, tucked it into her pantyhose, walked out of the office and mailed it to an online news outlet. The next month, the FBI was at her door to interrogate her. The film starts as she pulls up into her driveway, an agent knocks on her car window and starts the recording on his handheld device.

The film comes from Tina Satter, a noted playwright who first conceived of this idea for the stage. The show, called “Is This a Room,” was acclaimed in its off-Broadway run and the film version, which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is currently streaming on Max, is her directorial debut. It’s easy and lazy to ding a movie for being too much like a play, as though there is some bright line of demarcation between the formats aside from how audiences see them. But the point is that Satter has, in adapting “Reality” for the screen, turned limitations into opportunities. The smallness of the room starts to feel suffocating, especially as the questions get more specific and accusatory.

There is a dread to the whole endeavor from the first shot, even if you don’t remember how this story played out in the news. Though it takes some time for Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis) and Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton) to get to the real questions, the real reason why they’re there, the small stresses and indignities start to build. Reality (Sweeney) has come home with a car full of groceries. She has a cat in the house and a dog, a rescue who doesn’t like men. Her life has been put on pause and there’s nothing she can do about it. The agents tell her they have a search warrant for her home and her car and promptly tape off her modest yard with “crime scene” ribbon, take her phone and force her to stay outside as they search. She’s worried about the perishables, her cat escaping through the open door and her dog scaring people. Meanwhile, one of the agents is asking about her CrossFit routine and her life as a single person in Augusta.

Reality, wearing jean shorts and sneakers, does not seem aware that she has the right to not answer their questions and has the right to an attorney — and the agents certainly aren’t offering this information either. Instead, she is deferential and even helpful to these uninvited strangers, as though being nice might help things. Any woman or member of a marginalized group can surely relate.

Much credit goes to the actors. Hamilton walks a very delicate line in his performance. He looks like an innocuous IT guy and seems friendly enough, but his questions, even the smallest ones, feel double edged. Small talk has never been so stressful. Davis meanwhile keeps Reality on edge with small displays of power and authority, like now allowing her to touch her phone. But the show belongs to Sweeney, whose range continues to astonish — from “Euphoria” to “The White Lotus” and now this. She draws you in and you feel her stress and panic escalate.

It’s a true triumph of storytelling and performance and a reminder that films don’t need to be flashy or big to be great.

“Reality,” a Max release currently streaming, is rated TV-MA. Running time: 83 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr .

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Reality, starring Sydney Sweeney, is unsettling, vital viewing

The HBO film adapts the FBI transcript from Reality Winner’s interrogation into a stunning thriller.

by Alissa Wilkinson

When the play that would one day become the extraordinary drama Reality premiered off-Broadway, its whistleblower protagonist was still in a federal prison.

Back then, in February 2019, the show was called Is This a Room , an enigmatic quote from the show itself. An FBI agent looks into the place — it’s definitely a room — where two of his colleagues are interrogating the diminutive 25-year-old woman who lives there, and he makes the inquiry. He seems to be asking if the space needs to be searched. But it’s a strange, off-kilter query, one nobody would really know how to answer. Of course this is a room; what else would it be? It’s like asking where “here” is. Or whether reality exists.

There’s an ironic vigor to Reality ’s narrative, a practically allegorical sense that it was constructed by a lightly ham-fisted author with something to prove. It’s a story about truth and twisted facts, about shadows and subterfuge, and the woman at its center is literally named Reality.

What makes it so strange, and so chilling, is that nobody wrote it at all.

The text of Reality , like the play it’s based on, is a verbatim replica, including redactions, of the FBI’s transcript of its interrogation of Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner on June 3, 2017. Playwright and director Tina Satter pulled the transcript onto the stage, and now she and co-screenwriter James Paul Dallas have moved it — to incredible effect — onto the screen, starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis as the agents interrogating her.

Reality is, quite literally, the kind of movie where people just talk the whole time. But that’s precisely why it works. The dialogue (unaltered, with a key exception, from the stage production and thus the FBI’s transcript) has that greatest of theatrical qualities: Nobody is ever saying quite what they mean, and you are riveted, trying to figure out what they’re thinking, the balance of power shifting back and forth. That it works so well on screen is a tremendous testimony to both Satter’s directorial chops and the actors’ performances.

The real Reality Winner, you may recall from the headlines , was accused and convicted of leaking an intelligence report regarding attempted Russian hacking of voter rolls during the 2016 election. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she told the agents. Later, she told the media that she felt the government was intentionally misleading its citizens about Russia’s attempts to upend the election, and so she printed out a file and mailed it to the Intercept , which promised its sources anonymity.

The government found out and arrived on her doorstep even before the Intercept published the reports. For the crime of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” she was sentenced to five years and three months in federal prison — the longest ever imposed for this crime. And, incredibly, she was repeatedly denied bail, ultimately remaining there for just shy of four years, even as Congress and other government officials spoke about what she’d revealed publicly. Though she was transferred to a transitional facility on June 2, 2021, Winner never saw the show about her when it opened on Broadway that October — because she was still under house arrest.

Translating play to screen results in subtle changes. When the show was still on stage, redactions in the transcripts were staged visually, the audience briefly plunged into blackness, a switch flipped that left you disoriented in the audience. As a medium, film has a little more to play with visually, so instead we see Sweeney’s image fuzz out and disappear, then reappear every time the redaction ends.

There’s also context-setting by way of news clips; at the start, we see Winner in her cubicle, Fox News coverage of FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before Congress blaring from a TV on the wall. (Later, she’ll tell the agents that she repeatedly asked for the TVs to be switched to anything other than Fox News — Al Jazeera, or just pictures of people’s pets — and it greatly upset her.) Sometimes events and dates about which the characters are speaking are cut together with the real Reality’s images or Instagram posts; once in a while we see a waveform of the tapes, or hear some static, or see the transcript being typed, a way to remind us that what we are watching is not fiction.

Or not exactly, anyhow.

Most significantly, some of the redactions in the play have become un-redacted in the meantime. Many of them concerned the news outlet to which Winner leaked the document; the film eventually starts saying “the Intercept” out loud, and it’s a bit shocking at first. The reasoning seems clear. In November 2021, just after the Broadway show closed, Winner blasted the Intercept for its handling of the documents, the handling of which may have been responsible for her identification by the FBI (and which became a huge problem for the publication ). Visually, Reality makes the case that the Intercept screwed up. Small wonder.

The question at the center of Reality is complex. When it was a play, it was an inquiry into Winner’s motives. Why would a young woman who wants, as she repeatedly tells the agents, to be deployed — to get out of her dead-end position as a Farsi translator and actually use her extensive language skills — do something she knows is illegal? What “pushed her over the edge,” as one of the agents asks?

But as a movie, with the attendant close-ups on faces the medium provides, the question grows. Emotional complexity, the manifold feelings her character is experiencing, and her well-trained attempts to stay cool, flash across Sweeney’s face. We start to really see what she’s thinking, and that leads to a bigger, more unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the systems meant to protect us to do anything like that. Winner’s military record can’t save her. The fact that she speaks three languages spoken in the Middle East is called “impressive” many times by the agents, but each time the repetition is more loaded — it’s going to be used against her, we realize, to suggest her sympathies lie elsewhere (and so it was). The FBI isn’t on her side; they don’t even bother to read her Miranda rights. Well-worn gender dynamics suddenly become a factor, with Winner seemingly forced into joking about her cat being obese to pacify the men, sickeningly recognizable to women who’ve ever felt the need to play along for self-protection.

After her arrest, media reports — stitched into the film, lest the journalistic outlets conveniently forget — include people saying that, for instance, Winner is “a person who had taken a key interest in the Middle East, with suspicious motives,” that she “claimed to hate America,” that she was a “quintessential example of an inside threat.” Even the news outlet that was supposed to protect her, that provided such careful instructions for leakers who wish to remain anonymous, screwed it all up, and she paid the price.

Reality pulls out a sledgehammer

Watching Reality marks the third time I’ve seen Satter’s adaptation of Winner’s interrogation. Each time, I’m left angry and unsettled. Like many Americans, especially white middle-class women, I was raised to believe that my government messes up sometimes but is essentially on my side. That we are the good guys, a government by the people, for the people, and that we don’t imprison people here just to make sure nobody ever dares to do something like making sure we’re told the truth about our own elections. We lionize the brave person who speaks out. When we get older, and wiser, and maybe more skeptical, that bedrock belief remains: that the truth will protect us.

To that, Reality pulls out a sledgehammer, and a host of institutions failing to fulfill their own lofty promises. Is anyone doing what they’re supposed to do? If the US government is willing to impose a harsh sentence on someone like Reality Winner, what are we supposed to think? What else is false? Is reality real?

Is this a room?

Reality premieres on HBO on May 29 at 10 pm ET and will stream on Max.

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‘Reality’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Is Outstanding as Whistleblower Reality Winner in a Clever, Gripping Docudrama

Tina Satter skillfully adapts her scintillating off-Broadway play, using dialogue culled exclusively from the FBI transcripts of Winner's 2017 arrest. 

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She’s matched in form by Josh Hamilton as Agent Garrick and Marchánt Davis as Agent Taylor, the two men in charge of her questioning. A lot of their conversation is banal: While leading their suspect toward a confession, they chat amiably about Winner’s rescue dog, who is penned up in the backyard, occasionally barking. They joke about her overweight cat and are impressed by her crossfit regimen and fondness for firearms. And yet the tension never lags, it only ratchets up as Winner, who projects actual innocence and incomprehension right until she caves and admits that the leak came from her, gradually realizes the sheer magnitude of the trouble she is in. 

But even with such expert filmmaking at her disposal, and with her cast note-perfect in delivering every “um” and every cough, every non-sequitur and every mumbled aside (the transcript is available online if you want to compare), Satter’s approach continually insists we not take everything at face value, and distrust our own impulses to suspend disbelief. When we stumble on a moment where the transcript was censored, the image flickers and glitches, sometimes erasing the characters altogether as though Winner herself were being redacted. Even the pruning of the transcript is highlighted: At various junctures a title appears indicating how far we are into the recording, which marks out both the film’s grounding in fact, and its artifice. At one point Winner expresses her annoyance that her bosses have Fox News playing continually in the office (“Uh, just at least, for God’s sake, put Al Jazeera on, or a slideshow with people’s pets.”) But Satter’s smart, self-aware framing ensures her film cannot be accused of Fox-like distortions and manipulations, by reminding us that everything we watch, even the most rigorous reportage, is constructed and shaped into narratives by people with some agenda or other. 

One of the strangest quirks of this whole saga, and its subsequent remolding by Satter into a chillingly instructive lesson in the unstoppable mechanics of state power, is that it was revealed in the course of the trial that Winner was never read her Miranda rights. She was never informed of her right to silence, never advised of her right to a lawyer. And she was never formally cautioned that “anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” Whether you consider her breach of security traitorous or patriotic, it would be hard to watch “Reality” and not feel some sympathy for Winner, who wasn’t seeking fame or self-promotion, but following the dictates of her conscience. Satter’s taut, surprising “Reality” won’t change your mind on whistleblower ethics, but at least on a human level, it proves that sometimes what you say can be used for you too.

Reviewed at Cinemaxx, Berlin, Feb. 10, 2023. In Berlin Film Festival (Panorama). Running time: 85 MIN. 

• Production: A Seaview, 2 Sq Ft production. (World sales: MK2, Paris.) Producers: Noah Stahl, Brad Becker-Parton, Riva Marker, Greg Nobile. 
• Crew: Director: Tina Satter. Screenplay: Tina Satter, James Paul Dallas, based on the stage play by Tina Satter. Camera: Paul Yee. Editors: Jennifer Vecchiarello, Ron Dulin. Music: Nathan Micay.
• With: Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, Marchánt Davis.

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Review: Standing her ground in tense docudrama, Reality Winner discovers she’s in quicksand

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Thanks to the ubiquity of cop shows and crime stories, we’ve all seen a million taut interactions between law enforcement and interviewees, often portrayed as a game where the participants know the stakes, cards are held close, and variations in temperament and psychology abound.

But you’ve never seen that exchange brought to life the way playwright-turned-filmmaker Tina Satter does with unnerving humidity and deadpan expressionism in her disorientingly tense feature debut “Reality.” That’s in large part because she’s dramatizing in near-real time an authentic FBI transcript — what occurred between a pair of calculatingly patient male agents and their unsuspecting target of June 3, 2017: former Air Force linguist Reality Winner, played with captivating, heartbreaking resilience by Sydney Sweeney .

Winner, 25 at the time and working as an National Security Agency contractor in Augusta, Ga., would make headlines as the first person charged by President Trump’s Justice Department under the Espionage Act for leaking a government report to the media, in this case evidence of Russian interference in U.S. elections to the Intercept. She was sentenced to prison for five years and released after three for good behavior.

When the feds roll up to her boxy corner house in a leafy suburb, Winner is outside in cutoff jean shorts, a white button-down shirt, and unlaced yellow Converse. Her vibe is that of a weekend afternoon interrupted, to be briefly endured, perhaps, as agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis) stand near her like unassuming herd animals, making small talk while a team of men prepares to search her home. Winner shows concern for the near-future status of her dog and cat, which the agents sympathize with — they’re all pet people — as they gently inquire where inside they can have a conversation.

Column: The story of whistleblower Reality Winner is stranger than fiction

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Aug. 25, 2018

These are dense minutes, weirdly polite and surreal, but once these three players move to an unused utility room devoid of furniture, we soon realize “Reality” won’t be constrained by the play-by-play of a just-the-facts-ma’am procedural, or conversely by foregrounding itself as a politically driven account about a whistleblower wronged by a venal, shady administration. Rather, Satter is after a pungently atmospheric, beat-by-beat account of someone losing their freedom over the course of an hour and change, played out in ums and ers , banal chitchat, thick pauses and the smiling, situational menace of an authority never not confident about the outcome.

Satter, who with James Paul Dallas adapted her 2019 play “Is This a Room,” does occasionally break up her experiment in verbatim docudrama with cutaways and effects, and they all work keenly to exacerbate either the tension or the bizarreness. Time stamps and inserts of the transcript and .wav file serve to remind us that this very much happened, as do flashes of real photos and social media posts, evidence of millennial ordinariness, but also the colored-in specificity of Winner’s life: That she owned a pink AR-15 and lived for CrossFit competitions. And when the interview gets to the meat of the accusation — considered sensitive enough in the transcript to be blackened-over (despite it having been published by the Intercept) — actors briefly disappear from the frame, Satter’s tartly funny rendering of redacted speech.

There’s nothing missing, however, from Sweeney’s fermata of a performance, naturalistic and forensic, her reality/Reality a swirl of hopeful obfuscations eventually coming to grips with the fact that she’s not in some mucky puddle she can step out of — she’s in quicksand. But she won’t go without defending herself, without a piece of context, a sense of who she is beyond pets, languages, guns and weights, and where she saw the country going.

As her life up till then closes in a day-lit, stark room, the impact of Satter’s deceptively heavy depiction of the individual against the state crystallizes. “Reality” reaches beyond Winner’s experience on one momentous Saturday afternoon to prod us all into contemplating our own relationship to actions over words, and the powerfully wielded consequences that keep many — but thankfully, not all of us — from doing nothing.

'Reality'

Rating: TV-MA Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes Playing: May 29, 10 p.m., HBO; also available on Max

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‘Reality’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Stuns in Fact-Based Single-Room Whistleblower Thriller

Steph green.

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A young woman sits in a gray office — boxed in by her cubicle desk — as Fox News announces that Donald Trump has just fired FBI director James Comey, ostensibly for his investigation into how Russian interference in the 2016 election likely worked in the 45th president’s favor. Twenty-five days later, the same woman arrives back at her house in Augusta, Georgia to find two FBI agents with a search warrant for her property. She doesn’t look surprised. Within 80 minutes, this ex-Air Force member and NSA translator will have received the harshest ever sentence for the unauthorized release of government information to the media.

The woman — blond bun, denim shorts, a fresh and unassuming demeanor — is Reality Winner (a laughably ironic name, all things considered). Tina Satter’s fascinating directorial debut takes her startling indiscretion and spins it into something of a horror movie about the repercussions of Doing The Right Thing in the face of the United States’ surveillance system: a David and Goliath story where the stronger power slings stones squarely back in the underdog’s face. Not only is “Reality” inventively mounted and extraordinarily tense, but across 85 taut minutes, it proves something we already knew deep down : that Sydney Sweeney is the real deal.

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Adapted from her own off-Broadway play “Is This A Room,” the movie — in an ingenious touch also deployed in the play — takes its dialogue directly from a 107-minute audio transcript recorded on June 3, 2017, in which agents Wallace Taylor (Marchánt Davis) and Justin Garrick (Josh Hamilton) interrogated Winner for suspected mishandling of classified information. Inching towards its grand reveal through surreally awkward conversation, “Reality” is gripping and deceptively layered, delineating both the FBI’s queasily ingenious interrogation tactics and Sweeney’s extraordinary range.

At the core of the film’s strange and propulsive appeal is Winner herself, who is both an ordinary American and an extraordinary enigma. She’s patriotic, sporty, teaches yoga, fosters dogs, has military ties and a crucifix on her wall; she’s also fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, has three guns (including a pink AR-15 style rifle), and a Holy Qur’an decorated with pink Post-Its. She is friendly, compliant, and all-American, which only makes her tale more compellingly bizarre. It’s not the girlbossification of espionage, exactly: when she says that she “wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” we believe her.

We follow Winner on what is, essentially, both a chamber piece and a single-room thriller: three characters, increasing tension, mounting desperation. As the FBI agents attempt to diffuse Winner’s nerves through polite conversation and by acting calm — if “acting calm” means behaving as if you have just been told that a meteor is about the hit the earth, but you aren’t allowed to tell anyone — we are, in almost real-time, made privy to how Winner was encouraged to confess her crime. The crime being that she, out of a sense of duty to the American people who were being lied to, printed out an intelligence report explaining that Russian hackers accessed voter registration rolls in the United States with an email phishing operation, tucked the paper into her pantyhose, and mailed it to non-profit news organization The Intercept.

After gaining recognition as a flighty, flirty teen in “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” and starring in smart erotic thriller “The Voyeurs,” Sweeney is more than ready to step into the limelight as a lead . But before the upcoming Marvel tentpole “Madame Web,” she has cleverly made an indie that celebrates her extraordinary talents and wide-eyed likeability. As evidenced in “Reality” and elsewhere, the actress is just so good at acting like she’s on the verge of a freakout — she’s never, ever been happier, thank you very much — and here her subtly reddening cheeks, caving into ragged panic, only grows more and more compelling as Satter swoops her magnifying class of a camera into boxier and boxier close-ups.

The first-time screen director makes proceedings feel both genuinely scary and absurdly quotidian, with sudden, scary jolts of noise and jarring editing; she also deploys an intriguing method of cinematizing the redacted aspects of the transcript through frightening quasi-jumpcuts. It shows us an interrogation, in and of itself an exchange primed for cinematic dramatization, but here with the Hollywood sheen scrubbed off. Because the script is taken nearly world-for-word from the real incident, the resulting conversations are repetitive in a strangely lifelike, intriguing manner. By weaving in and re-creating real-life audio and photographs, Satter work feels almost documentarian.

It’s just one small story in an ongoing deluge of Trump-era corruption, yet Reality Winner is proof alone that even the most dedicated and patriotic of Americans were sick to the back teeth with the hallucinogenic blare of endless Fox News twaddle. Considering her increasing helplessness and anger at the government’s cover-ups and her insider’s view on where the truth truly lay, it’s easy to see how she finally snapped, undoing years of careful work to maintain top-secret security clearance.

And while this may be the most brutally harsh example of the old adage “snitches get stitches” (Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison), Satter carefully exposes the mounting tension and mania behind the whole debacle with a fresh point of view: not a mere gimmick, but a unique, pint-sized take on the saturated canon of rifling-through-the-cabinet whistleblower thrillers.

“Reality” premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution.

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‘reality’ review: sydney sweeney is devastating as reality winner in taut thriller shaped from fbi transcript.

Tina Satter makes a sharp feature debut with this mesmerizing adaptation of her play ‘Is This a Room,’ documenting events culminating in the arrest of whistleblower Reality Winner.  

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Playwright Tina Satter’s Is This a Room is one of the more anomalous standouts of recent New York theater seasons. A 65-minute verbatim docudrama molded entirely out of FBI interrogation transcripts leading to the arrest of NSA whistle-blower Reality Winner, it was propelled by stellar reviews from a small downtown space to a leading Off Broadway house, before landing on Broadway for a short run in 2021 that consolidated its critical success even if it struggled commercially.

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By swapping the stage production’s minimalist design for a scrupulously realistic representation of the house in Augusta, Georgia, that Winner was renting in 2017, Reality , as the film has been retitled, risks diminishing the uncomfortable convergence of the banal and the surreal that characterized the play. But if anything, that uneasiness is even more potent on the screen.

Satter shows unfaltering command of the medium for a first-time film director, notably in her penetrating use of the closeup, which makes the steadily exposed raw nerves of Sydney Sweeney ’s remarkable performance in the title role all the more disturbing to witness.

The parts of the interrogation detailing the specific material Winner leaked to the media were redacted in the original transcript, which Satter conveys by switching for brief moments to a blank screen. But anyone who followed the news cycle knows that the 25-year-old former Air Force intelligence officer shared a document containing proof of Russian cyber interference in the 2016 election.

That fact anchors the drama in the years of the Trump administration, which went to great pains to keep that information out of the public sphere. It also suggests why Winner was given such an unusually harsh sentence of 5 years and 3 months jail time. While she was granted supervised release after four, it remains the heaviest sentence ever imposed under the espionage act against an American citizen for leaking classified documents.

When Reality returns home from the grocery store three weeks later, she’s greeted in her driveway by two FBI officers, the relaxed, regular-guy Garrick ( Josh Hamilton ), dressed in Saturday-afternoon dad-wear, and his sterner, more taciturn partner Taylor (Marchánt Davis), whose buff physicality is immediately threatening. They exchange small talk before casually revealing that they have warrants to search her house, car and phone due to possible mishandling of classified documents. An unnamed third officer (Benny Elledge) arrives soon after, a hulking presence made more unsettling by his silence and his belittling stare.

There’s almost a comic element to their stiffness as they negotiate Reality’s concerns about her rescue dog, which “doesn’t like men,” eventually allowing her to bring the animal out into the yard and secure it on a leash. The same goes for their questions about her cat, with the team of search officers that descend regularly reporting that it’s either on or under the bed.

But the sly humor of the scene is undercut when the agents allow Reality to put her perishables away in the fridge and there’s barely space for her small frame with all the testosterone in the kitchen. The sense of dread mounts as other officers stretch crime-scene tape around the perimeter of her yard.

But in the same way that Sweeney’s body language dissolves from loose to rigid to broken, slowly crumbling inside as the seriousness of their visit becomes clear, Hamilton and the other actors gradually drop all pretense of this being a courtesy call designed to gather information. It’s obvious from the transcript that they already know pretty much everything they need to know, and the ways in which that knowledge is slowly disclosed makes for nail-biting drama.

Reality’s house is barely furnished, and the main part of the interrogation takes place in a shabby back room that’s completely empty. She repeatedly apologizes for the lack of a place to sit, as if they’re invited guests, but that allows Satter to play with the spatial and physical dynamics in crafty ways as the men loom around her.

One of the heartbreaking aspects of Sweeney’s layered performance is the subtle indications of Reality’s awareness that Garrick’s nice-guy act is mere professional role play. But she goes along with it because doing otherwise would mean dropping the last of her defenses.

While the action unfolds over less than two hours in a semblance of real time, the spiral of tragedy feels full-bodied, no matter where you stand on Winner’s actions. It’s shattering when she finally breaks down, admitting that with all the misinformation constantly being circulated, she asked herself if a pernicious attack on American election integrity shouldn’t be made public. And what was she doing in that job if she had no power to expose such anti-Democratic sabotage?

“Am I going to jail tonight?” she asks the agents, getting boiler-plate evasive answers before they lead her outside to be cuffed. A sickening feeling wells up in your stomach as you watch this young woman who made a questionable decision fret about who’s going to take care of her pets. In Sweeney’s expertly calibrated performance, a complete departure from her work on The White Lotus and Euphoria , Reality often seems barely more than a teenager.

The film concludes with the blustery overkill of a Republican spokesman spouting off to press about Winner being “a quintessential example of an insider threat” while Tucker Carlson foams at the mouth in his trademark showboating outrage. It hits just the right insidious note to make this tense, impressively sustained thriller about power, surveillance and moral responsibility linger in your head with many questions. Top of that list is “What would I have done?”

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‘Reality’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Gives Her Best Performance Yet in Masterful and Tense True Story

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This review was originally part of our coverage for the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.

In 2017, former US Air Force translator Reality Winner leaked an intelligence report revealing Russia’s attempted interference in 2016’s US presidential elections. While Winner acted out of her sense of patriotic duty, she nevertheless committed a crime. So, it isn't surprising that Winner was arrested and convicted. What's shocking is that Winner got the longest prison sentence ever for the unauthorized release of government documents to the media.

The FBI transcripts from Winner's interrogation and arrest shed a grim light on the matter, showing how sexism and party inclinations played a part in the translator's excessive punishment. That's why Tina Satter decided to turn the transcripts into the gripping Broadway play Is This A Room , which the playwright is now turning into a movie in her film debut. Like in the original play, Reality reproduces the original audio recording of Winner’s interrogation to the letter, keeping faithful to every pause, cough, laugh, and bark in the background. However, Reality is not a reproduction of Is This a Room , as Satter gets her hands dirty in film language to make a tense story even more compelling in a remarkable directorial debut.

Starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner, Reality opens with a superposition of reenactments and audio tracks, underlining how everything we see on the silver screen is taken from the original recording made by FBI agents during their raid on the translator’s house. For the entire duration of Winner’s interrogation, Reality will remind the viewer these are factual events by adding small snippets of recordings, official documents, photos, Winner’s Instagram posts, and even news programs. While Reality is not a documentary, Satter uses reality as raw material to constantly remind us what Winner went through. At the same time, the director also finds creative ways to make redacted passages have weight in the story by playing around with image distortions and characters displacement.

While Winner would be accused of betraying her country out of hate for the United States, reduced to a vile disruptor, the interrogation records paint a more complex picture. Winner was angry at the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and caught in the middle of the political turmoil that swept America. Still, she doesn’t conform to the image of a resentful progressive, as she still keeps automatic rifles in her house for personal protection and dedicates her life to serving the Armed Forces. There was no master plan behind Winner's action, as she was just a human being, filled with contradictions, who decided to act on impulse after finding a document that was so important for US history that the Senate would recognize its public interest.

RELATED: Where To Watch and Stream 'Reality'

By giving the audience access to Winner’s interrogation dialogue, Reality provides a glimpse of a confused and insecure woman who bit off more than she could chew and was caught red-handed for a crime she didn’t even realize the gravity of. Reality also does a great job showing how gender roles played a big part in Winner’s conviction, as she’s corned by a group of patronizing FBI agents who show genuine surprise by her physical and intellectual achievements. Using the weight of the position, the FBI agents try to turn Winner into a frail thing that’ll bend to their will, with no lawyer around to counsel the young woman. That, combined with Winner’s explicit political preferences, made her an example for the nation with an unfair charge considering her crimes.

Reality also finds time to denounce the irresponsible action of the media regarding Winner’s whistleblowing. Winner felt the world had to know about this dangerous political attack, and decided to act by sending classified information to The Intercept. And the same outlet that promises to embrace whistleblowers betrays journalism ethics by giving away the name of the source that offered them the classified document.

Winner’s mistake would open the country to an essential discussion about national security and the reliability of the electoral system. Still, she got betrayed by the media that used her leaking to gain fame before getting a harsh conviction that seems to be more linked to her gender and political preferences than to the gravity of her crime. Reality turns this complex case into a thrilling exploration of the police system, never daring to reduce its characters to the simplistic parts they would play in news stories.

Due to Reality 's spacial and temporal constraints, the movie could only work with an impeccable cast, which it fortunately has. On that note, Sweeney gives the best performance of her career, turning every small trembling and hesitation in the voice of Winner’s original audio into a source of inspiration to bring a layered character to life. Sweeney's take on Winner reflects the emotional whirlwind the young woman went through after FBI agents showed up in her footsteps. Thanks to her, Reality is a mesmerizing experience that doesn’t hold any punches and will shake any viewer to their core.

Reality is available to stream on Max.

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