A one-location thriller with dialogue taken verbatim from an FBI transcript doesn’t immediately strike you as the most engaging watch. But Reality ends up being one of 2023’s most gripping watches so far, in large part due to a masterclass from Sydney Sweeney.
For her directorial debut, Tina Satter adapted her 2019 stage play Is This a Room which centred on the interrogation of Reality Winner. In June 2017, the 25-year-old was confronted by the FBI at her home over the leaking of a classified report to the press.
Again, that description could run the risk of making Reality sound like a dry political drama, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Whether you know the true story or not, you won’t be able to look away as Reality Winner’s afternoon goes from bad to worse.
There’s only one place to start with Reality. We already knew Sydney Sweeney was a talented actor from the likes of Euphoria, The Handmaid’s Tale and The White Lotus, but here she takes it up another level for a performance that deserves awards recognition.
Sweeney is in practically every frame of the movie and disappears into the role of Reality Winner. It’s not a showy performance; for the most part she makes Reality seem as small as she can and the verbatim dialogue is full of stutters and pauses. There’s no grandstanding speech, but Sweeney is magnetic all the same.
It’s an astonishing central performance that the filmmaking craft rises to. While it’s often as formal as the FBI interrogation, there are visual flourishes for redacted passages of the transcript and subtle shifts in perspective to showcase Reality’s emotional journey.
As she grows more confident during the interrogation, she starts to take up more of the frame, rebelling against the gender politics of the FBI framing her as just some little girl who didn’t know what she was doing. It’s a fascinating watch, innovative in its use of the single-location which, for the most part, is a bare white room.
Despite the serious nature of Reality’s situation, this isn’t a bleak watch either. There’s humour sprinkled throughout, often absurd in nature such as the FBI trying to get Reality’s cat out from under her bed. Satter cuts back to the transcript throughout to highlight that as odd as it gets, including frequent references to CrossFit, it really played out like this.
Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton provide excellent support as the two agents interrogating Reality, perfecting the dry, awkward nature of most of the exchange. When they need to be though, they switch on a dime to be intimidating, those subtle shifts of perspective coming to the fore again.
We’re not even halfway through the year, but Reality is such an absorbing and excellently-crafted watch that you know you’ve seen one of the best movies of the year. And in Sydney Sweeney’s performance, we’ve seen a level of performance few others will match in 2023.
Reality is out now in UK cinemas and is available to watch on Max in the US.
You Might Also Like