‘Reality’ review: Sydney Sweeney is a tour de force in intense U.S. election whistleblower thriller | Berlinale

Playwright Tina Satter makes her screen debut with Reality, a simmering investigative drama reconstructing the arrest of Reality Winner, an NSA contractor and ex-Air Force member who leaked a document as proof of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. elections to “The Intercept”. Satter has already rendered this story in a theater performance called “Is This a Room?”, using the FBI interrogation transcript verbatim. She follows the same cue here, almost canonizing the words spoken in that particular chronotope: June 3rd 2017, only a few weeks after Winter leaked the NSA article. This is the second film about these events after the 2021 documentary United States vs. Reality Winner by Sonia Kennebeck. Here, Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria) stars as the lead and expectedly carries the whole film on her shoulders.

In June 2017 Winter was charged with “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” under the Espionage act instilled in the early 20th century, way before the digital age. This discrepancy which has played a crucial part in the young woman’s sentencing (the maximum ever given for this sort of crime) made its way into the film in many blink-it-and-you-miss it moments. What felt like the most distinctively innovative feature of Reality as a film, was the use of glitches, desktop footage, and on-screen literal redaction. It may look like a simple erasure effect, but whenever a redacted word in the report was “bleeped” out of the dialogue, the speaker would simply disappear out of the frame for the duration of the spoken word or phrase. It’s a jarring thing to observe, the way it punctuates an emotionally tense plot with an even more intense visual style.

In that regard, I’ve got one reference for you which says it all: Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a Sundance gem which also played at Berlinale’s Panorama section in 2020. In it, Michael Latham’s claustrophobic cinematography relied heavily on close-ups of Jane (Julia Garner), the film’s lead, as she navigates her working day as an assistant to none other than Harvey Weinstein. Reality may not be a #MeToo film, but it certainly pays attention to Winner being the only woman among eleven male FBI agents who, as the film shows, delay showing her the search warrant and skip the reading of her Miranda rights. Her compliancy, captured in mannerisms and speech, is then embodied by Sweeney with confidence. Even more, she remains open, accessible, flustered over perishable groceries and her pets potentially running away during the search.

Reality’s cinematographer, Paul Yee (The Fits) goes for an uneasy intimacy forced upon the viewer by the intense close-ups of Sweeney’s trembling face. Her bodily movements are also meticulously observed and this way of filming captures both Winner’s subjective anxiety and the investigator’s suspicious gaze. The performances themselves do feel slightly theatrical and this can be attributed to both the mode of expression in the interview transcripts and to the origin of the film as a continuation of Satter’s play. That said, Sydney Sweeney is marvelous and dedicated to an empathetic portrayal of a woman who was not lauded as a whistleblower of the same proportion as other male counterparts have been.

This multi-layered adaptation—recording to transcript to performance to film—relies on a hard relationship with its sources, hence the verbatim dialogue and the lack of improvisation. That what can feel stagey, was actually said in real life, makes Reality a peculiar case of cinema and the actors’ performances are built on that realistic remainder. We are told so from the film’s very beginning, in a title card, and carry this knowledge along for its 85 minutes of runtime, which are intense, even entrancing at times. Towards the end, the energy wanes, the formal devices are slightly abused to the point where it takes you out of its high concept minimalist purpose, and the film feels a bit too-self contained. Typical for a first feature and not necessarily a disadvantage, but if it wasn’t for Sydney Sweeney, it would not have made a lot of waves.

Grade: B

This review is from the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival.