Reality, the first feature film by Tina Satter, began life as the director’s successful verbatim stage play Is This a Room in New York in early 2019. Like the examples above, it too adheres to existing, documented speech from a real event: the interrogation of the remarkably named NSA linguist Reality Winner by FBI agents at her home in Augusta, Georgia, in 2017. Her crime: leaking a classified document pertaining to Russia’s hijacking of the 2016 US election to adversarial journalism organ The Intercept and, in the process, revealing the sources and methods used for intelligence gathering by her home country. Utilising only the words spoken by Winner and her questioners from a period of less than two hours, the film follows, nearly in real time, the investigation process as it unfolded that June afternoon. In support of its documentary bona fides, Reality begins by assuring us in writing of the authenticity of what we are about to hear, and adds a number of repeating graphic inserts as constant reminders of this promise: the bureau’s verbatim transcription; a vibrating sound wave with accompanying time stamps; images of the real Winner as gleaned from her Instagram account. In its framing, much of what we see and hear aligns with our expectations of a verbatim documentary.

Sydney Sweeney as Reality Winner in Reality.

Unlike others in this mode, Satter’s film also flirts prima facie with the realms of fiction, and its images especially make clear that while this work may be based on a true story, it will also provoke a sense of cognitive dissonance in its audience. Its in-demand lead actor, Sydney Sweeney, is the most obvious marker of the film’s hybrid status, her face adorning all promotional materials. Sweeney, her star already set high in the HBO firmament (Euphoria, The White Lotus), has a proven ability to inhabit simultaneously the roles of beleaguered ingénue and pot-stirring bombshell that serve her particularly well here. Late on in the film, Reality Winner explains the lack of surprise she shows at the arrival of the agents on her doorstep as a result of her ‘resting bitch face’, a look that has belied the underhanded motives of some of Sweeney’s previous characters. Against the increasingly pointed questions of the initially friendly FBI, Sweeney executes a range of minuscule muscle twitches, and holds the gaze of her interviewers with eyes that seem perpetually ready to spill over with tears, but never quite get there.

Sweeney is not alone in bestowing a sense of drama on the factual material here. As Agent Garrick, Josh Hamilton at first carries some of the endearing dorkiness viewers may remember from his role as the father in Bo Burnham’s Eight Grade (2018), but transforms slowly into a more decisive figure alongside the imposing biceps of Marchánt Davis (Agent Taylor). Winner and the agents converse mostly in a room bereft of any furniture (not unlike an empty stage), and the uncomfortable awkwardness of this de facto interrogation room immerses us us in the process. Shots linger longer than expected on the principals, and the patient zooming of DP Paul Yee’s camera adds to the claustrophobia of the encounter. The droning synths and strings of Nathan Micay’s haunting score ratchet up the tension, providing aural cues that make it very clear that the investigation is heading in only one direction (these are not always necessary, given that the air could already be cut with a knife).

A number of other onscreen tics join this anxiety-inducing chorus as the truth comes out: blurred, slow-motion point of view shots add a more subjective dimension to the proceedings; glitchy overlays make the accused vanish from the screen whenever she speaks redacted words from the ‘unclassified’ FBI transcript; cutaways to Winner’s chained pet dog and cat enhance her feelings of helplessness; a snail trying in vain to escape from a windowsill catches the protagonist’s eye. Such details, alongside Winner’s signature pink AR-15 assault rifle and her laceless buttercup yellow All Stars, suggest a certain naïveté or innocence in the situation, even as we hear of her desire to leak the documents as a means of serving the American people. While Winner certainly knows more than she at first lets on, she is, as the agents tell her, ‘not trying to be Snowden’. And indeed, neither is the film trying to emulate the 2016 Oliver Stone biopic of that name, nor the Laura Poitras documentary Citizenfour (2014) that also focused on the prolific CIA whistleblower.

Pitched somewhere between these two approaches to the life of a leaker, Reality invites us to sit with both the real particulars of the case, and with images that we are told in the closing credits have been ‘composited or invented for dramatic purposes’. Of course, like the documents that Winner in her daily job converted from Farsi into English, a ‘word for word’ translation is never really possible; even verbatim documentary will not reproduce a facsimile of what actually happened. In any case, as the adage goes, sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction: given that our news cycle has recently conjured a photo of boxes of classified documents ringed around a former president’s toilet, perhaps marrying the factual with the seemingly unbelievable is an exercise to which we have lately become accustomed.

Reality (Kismet), 82 minutes, screened during the 2023 Sydney Film Festival and will be released nationally from 29 June 2023.