Reality on HBO and Max: Sydney Sweeney stars in a unsettling, vital movie

When the play that may someday develop into the extraordinary drama Reality premiered off-Broadway, its whistleblower protagonist was nonetheless in a federal jail.

Back then, in February 2019, the present was referred to as Is This a Room, an enigmatic quote from the present itself. An FBI agent appears into the place — it’s positively a room — the place two of his colleagues are interrogating the diminutive 25-year-old girl who lives there, and he makes the inquiry. He appears to be asking if the house must be searched. But it’s a unusual, off-kilter question, one no one would actually know reply. Of course that is a room; what else wouldn’t it be? It’s like asking the place “here” is. Or whether or not actuality exists.

There’s an ironic vigor to Reality’s narrative, a virtually allegorical sense that it was constructed by a evenly ham-fisted creator with one thing to show. It’s a story about fact and twisted details, about shadows and subterfuge, and the lady at its heart is actually named Reality.

What makes it so unusual, and so chilling, is that no one wrote it in any respect.

The textual content of Reality, just like the play it’s primarily based on, is a verbatim duplicate, together with redactions, of the FBI’s transcript of its interrogation of Air Force veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner on June 3, 2017. Playwright and director Tina Satter pulled the transcript onto the stage, and now she and co-screenwriter James Paul Dallas have moved it — to unbelievable impact — onto the display screen, starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner and Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis because the brokers interrogating her.

Reality is, fairly actually, the form of movie the place folks simply speak the entire time. But that’s exactly why it really works. The dialogue (unaltered, with a key exception, from the stage manufacturing and thus the FBI’s transcript) has that biggest of theatrical qualities: Nobody is ever saying fairly what they imply, and you might be riveted, attempting to determine what they’re considering, the steadiness of energy shifting again and forth. That it really works so nicely on display screen is a large testimony to each Satter’s directorial chops and the actors’ performances.

The actual Reality Winner, chances are you’ll recall from the headlines, was accused and convicted of leaking an intelligence report relating to tried Russian hacking of voter rolls throughout the 2016 election. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she advised the brokers. Later, she advised the media that she felt the federal government was deliberately deceptive its residents about Russia’s makes an attempt to upend the election, and so she printed out a file and mailed it to the Intercept, which promised its sources anonymity.

The authorities came upon and arrived on her doorstep even earlier than the Intercept printed the stories. For the crime of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet,” she was sentenced to 5 years and three months in federal jail — the longest ever imposed for this crime. And, extremely, she was repeatedly denied bail, in the end remaining there for simply shy of 4 years, at the same time as Congress and different authorities officers spoke about what she’d revealed publicly. Though she was transferred to a transitional facility on June 2, 2021, Winner by no means noticed the present about her when it opened on Broadway that October — as a result of she was nonetheless beneath home arrest.

Translating play to display screen outcomes in refined modifications. When the present was nonetheless on stage, redactions in the transcripts had been staged visually, the viewers briefly plunged into blackness, a swap flipped that left you disoriented in the viewers. As a medium, movie has a little extra to play with visually, so as an alternative we see Sweeney’s picture fuzz out and disappear, then reappear each time the redaction ends.

There’s additionally context-setting by the use of information clips; at the beginning, we see Winner in her cubicle, Fox News protection of FBI Director James Comey’s testimony earlier than Congress blaring from a TV on the wall. (Later, she’ll inform the brokers that she repeatedly requested for the TVs to be switched to something apart from Fox News — Al Jazeera, or simply photos of individuals’s pets — and it tremendously upset her.) Sometimes occasions and dates about which the characters are talking are reduce along with the actual Reality’s photographs or Instagram posts; as soon as in a whereas we see a waveform of the tapes, or hear some static, or see the transcript being typed, a approach to remind us that what we’re watching is just not fiction.

Or not precisely, anyhow.

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Most considerably, a number of the redactions in the play have develop into un-redacted in the meantime. Many of them involved the information outlet to which Winner leaked the doc; the movie finally begins saying “the Intercept” out loud, and it’s a bit stunning at first. The reasoning appears clear. In November 2021, simply after the Broadway present closed, Winner blasted the Intercept for its dealing with of the paperwork, the dealing with of which can have been liable for her identification by the FBI (and which turned a large downside for the publication). Visually, Reality makes the case that the Intercept screwed up. Small marvel.

The query on the heart of Reality is complicated. When it was a play, it was an inquiry into Winner’s motives. Why would a younger girl who needs, as she repeatedly tells the brokers, to be deployed — to get out of her dead-end place as a Farsi translator and truly use her intensive language abilities — do one thing she is aware of is illegitimate? What “pushed her over the edge,” as one of many brokers asks?

But as a movie, with the attendant close-ups on faces the medium gives, the query grows. Emotional complexity, the manifold emotions her character is experiencing, and her well-trained makes an attempt to remain cool, flash throughout Sweeney’s face. We begin to actually see what she’s considering, and that results in a greater, extra unnerving demonstration of the abject failure of the programs meant to guard us to do something like that. Winner’s navy file can’t save her. The indisputable fact that she speaks three languages spoken in the Middle East is known as “impressive” many occasions by the brokers, however every time the repetition is extra loaded — it’s going for use towards her, we notice, to counsel her sympathies lie elsewhere (and so it was). The FBI isn’t on her aspect; they don’t even trouble to learn her Miranda rights. Well-worn gender dynamics instantly develop into a issue, with Winner seemingly compelled into joking about her cat being overweight to pacify the boys, sickeningly recognizable to ladies who’ve ever felt the necessity to play alongside for self-protection.

After her arrest, media stories — stitched into the movie, lest the journalistic shops conveniently overlook — embody folks saying that, as an example, Winner is “a person who had taken a key interest in the Middle East, with suspicious motives,” that she “claimed to hate America,” that she was a “quintessential example of an inside threat.” Even the information outlet that was supposed to guard her, that offered such cautious directions for leakers who want to stay nameless, screwed all of it up, and she paid the value.

Watching Reality marks the third time I’ve seen Satter’s adaptation of Winner’s interrogation. Each time, I’m left indignant and unsettled. Like many Americans, particularly white middle-class ladies, I used to be raised to imagine that my authorities messes up generally however is basically on my aspect. That we’re the great guys, a authorities by the folks, for the folks, and that we don’t imprison folks right here simply to verify no one ever dares to do one thing like ensuring we’re advised the reality about our personal elections. We lionize the courageous one who speaks out. When we become older, and wiser, and possibly extra skeptical, that bedrock perception stays: that the reality will defend us.

To that, Reality pulls out a sledgehammer, and a host of establishments failing to satisfy their very own lofty guarantees. Is anybody doing what they’re presupposed to do? If the US authorities is prepared to impose a harsh sentence on somebody like Reality Winner, what are we presupposed to assume? What else is fake? Is actuality actual?

Is this a room?

Reality premieres on HBO on May 29 at 10 pm ET and will stream on Max.