Whistleblowing. It is the perfect subject for films of the moment, marrying two things we cannot get enough of: thrillers and workplace dramas. These projects have a propulsive, pulpy energy, with (usually) enough feel-good integrity to not feel like a guilty pleasure. The genre adapts for Oscar fodder (Erin Brockovich), screwball takes (The Informant!) and all-time classics (All the President’s Men). So along comes Reality, a film from New York-based writer-director Tina Satter about a young American woman improbably named Reality Winner, which leans into all those modes, but adds its own irresistible, pleasingly strange spin.
It is a Saturday in June, and Winner (played by Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney) returns from work to find two FBI officers, R. Wallace Taylor (Marchant Davis) and Justin C. Garrick (Josh Hamilton) in her driveway. Or, rather, they find her, and immediately start to record the interrogation. Reality’s big talking point – apart from casting white-hot rising star Sweeney – is that it uses the real-life transcript between the FBI officers and Winner for its script. You know this, because the film tells you – in writing, and also in unnecessary fade-outs to transcript visuals – and also because writers couldn’t craft sentences quite this mundane.
Not that it matters, when the story is this gripping. Winner served in the US Air Force, making the most of her language skills – she is fluent in Arabic, Dari, Pashto, and a juddering American – as a linguist in Maryland. Later, Winner moved to Georgia (where this film takes place) and started a job at an agency, Pluribus International Corporation, which sold services to the National Security Agency. It was here that she happened on a classified documents about Russian interference in America’s 2016 election. The film picks up in 2017, depicting the hour and a half that change Winner’s life forever. (It seems strange to issue spoiler warnings for a film about a widely-publicised news event, but if you know nothing of Winner’s case, I imagine Reality has a heightened excitement, as it drip feeds backstory and revelations.)
Those unadorned sentences, initially off-putting, swiftly become enthralling. Satter had originally used the transcript for a play, named Is This A Room, which ran in New York in 2019, before transferring to Broadway in 2021. Mostly for the better, the film’s theatrical DNA is intact: the characters’ precise movements, intimate acting, sparse set design (it mostly takes place in Winner’s deeply bleak, unused back room). It is possible to read any number of themes into Reality, about gender dynamics, about gun ownership, about law enforcement, and that richness is down to the script and direction, which suggests a lot but doesn’t tell you anything. This all actually happened – they have the recordings to prove it! – and you just have to make up your own mind. An intriguing prospect.
Except, of course, it didn’t all happen. Reality Winner does not look like a beloved actress on a zeitgeisty teen show. (Presumably, neither do agents Taylor and Garrick, but I couldn’t find photos of them to check.) Real life is not adeptly film-directed, nor does it run to a tight hour and 23 minutes (bless you, under 90-minute movies!). So Reality takes the best part of, uh, reality, and blends it with the best part of Hollywood. The two agents are note-perfect villains: smooth, kind-until-they’re-not, slippery as a sweaty brow. Sweeney, likely relieved not to be vomiting in a jacuzzi in Sam Levinson’s teen hellscape Euphoria, is the stand-out. The 25-year-old actor does have something of Erin Brockovich’s Julia Roberts in her: an insanely watchable screen presence, who demands your attention without ever being too much. In Reality, her expressive blankness, so terrifying on The White Lotus and vulnerable on Euphoria, is magnetic.
What the film must do, in real time, is help you understand Winner’s motives and make you invested in her predicament. If the former feels occasionally blurry, it excels in the latter, in no small part because of Sweeney. Winner is a whistleblower, yes, but she’s also a yoga instructor, a girl who likes to holiday by herself, who worries for her pets (one cat, one dog), who owns a pink gun, and is a decorated member of the Air Force. Sweeney brings all those realities alive, suffusing Winner with sympathy and occasionally repulsion. Whatever the film’s chances at box office victory – and really, it seems unlikely that it could ever be a smash – Sweeney is destined to become a winner.
‘Reality’ is out in cinemas on 2 June in the UK
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
