Sydney Sweeney Thrills in Whistleblower Thriller

Former enlisted U.S. Air Force member and NSA translator Reality Winner, who was arrested by federal authorities in 2017 for leaking classified information, has a fortuitous first name for a dramatist looking to interrogate both the state of our world and the lines between fiction and document, between script and transcript. Hence the straightforward title of Tina Satter’s Reality, the resonances of which hardly need further explanation.

The dialogue in Satter and James Paul Dallas’s screenplay is drawn directly from recordings the F.B.I. made as they executed a search warrant on Reality’s home in Augusta, Georgia, and interviewed the young woman about her illegal leak of intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 election to online news publication The Intercept. This would seem to include all the awkward pauses, the uncomfortable small talk, and the sudden coughs and throat clears that become such unsettling features of Satter’s portrait of Winner’s ordeal.

In the title role, Sydney Sweeney commands the almost paranoiac gaze of Satter’s camera, gradually transforming from a relatively composed but visibly uncomfortable everywoman to someone barely keeping it together as her world falls apart around her. Or phrased differently, that world is redacted into incoherence, as blacked-out portions of the F.B.I. transcript increasingly manifest themselves on screen as sudden silence between the characters.

Confronted by two F.B.I. agents (Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis) one summer afternoon when she arrives home, Reality cooperates with their search without even asking to see the warrant. For much of the film, Satter sticks us outside with the woman as she crosses her arms and shifts her weight back and forth in her front yard, answering questions and making small talk about her dog and cat and fitness routines while a team of agents floods into her home.

Given how inflected they are with tangential nonsense and the dead ends of real conversations, the exchanges between Reality and the agents hardly smack immediately of officious state authority or smoothly operating G-Men. The film’s dramatic structure, then, enhances the disorienting absurdity of Reality’s situation, as she finds herself at the mercy of state power executed by a bunch of dudes. At one point, Hamilton’s dumpier agent humble-brags about hurting himself while doing CrossFit. The clearly much fitter agent played by Davis exchanges a sardonic look with yoga instructor and acknowledged CrossFit fiend Reality, a discomfiting moment of alliance between the whistleblower and the man invading her home.

Such moments call to mind nothing less than Franz Kafka’s The Trial. In fact, one might fairly accurately describe the entire film as a feature-length expansion of the opening scene of Orson Welles’s adaptation of Kafka’s classic. Just as the pair of agents that invade the room of Anthony Perkins’s Josef K. lead him by the nose through conversational roundabouts, so do the F.B.I. agents here take Reality through directionless chatter that’s either a strategic interrogative misdirect or simply the banal utterings of people who wield the power of the law less like a cudgel and more like a conversation piece. And it all climaxes in a drably nondescript, claustrophobic, empty space within Reality’s home that Kafka would have appreciated.

What makes this different from Josef K.’s ordeal, of course, is that this is, well, reality. To remind us of this, the film intermittently interrupts the staged drama with cuts to a wave pattern of the dialogue or staged footage of the official transcript being typed up. More than merely reminding us of their verité conceit, though, the filmmakers’ intermixing of dramaturgy and document reminds the audience of the complex network of information streams that make up our and Reality’s reality. As the film ratchets up the tension with traditional methods like tighter close-ups and a crescendoing score by Nathan Micay, it also finds more gaps in the record, holes in the information stream that augment the slipperiness of the real.

We’re engaged in a dialectic, pondering the relationship between the available information and what has been invented or inferred for the staging. Satter uses this dialectic to invert expectations, as it’s often the clearly dramatized moments—Reality’s glances at trees in the breeze and a snail crawling on a window—that seem the most real, whereas the behavior of the agents, drawn straight from the record, often feels the most artificial.

The story of Reality Winner was overshadowed by the scandals of the Trump era and the frenzied conjecture that dominated the media at the time. It was like one more dire tweet thread in a seemingly infinite heap of surreal end-of-empire discourse. Reality’s very effective drama concerns state surveillance and control, but it’s also a film for those of us who, during the Trump years, felt our already rather tenuous grasp of reality slipping once and for all from our grasp.