Review: Reality

Director:  Tina Satter

Stars:  Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis, Josh Hamilton

While there was plenty of talk during his miserable 4-year tenure as president of the ‘Trump era’, cinema is a reactive medium – movies take time – and so it is up to the years following an event to muster the artistic response and fallout. Right now, then, is cinema’s ‘Trump era’, and the US’s grassroots efforts are evidencing this well. Only last month Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline spoke to an emboldened sense of activism in the young encouraged by escalations in climate change rhetoric. The resulting movie transformed a political manifesto into a taut, recognisable genre thriller. Hot on it’s heels comes Tina Satter’s revelatory feature debut. It is as close to a cross between the documentaries of Laura Poitras and the sparky micro-budget efforts of Steven Soderbergh as you’re likely to find and as good as that sounds.

Cliché as it is to say, the best way to experience Reality is with as little foreknowledge as possible. For the perfect taster, Vertigo Releasing’s 52 second teaser trailer is your best bet for getting a flavour of a movie that ratchets tension through the slow dolling of information. For those who need a little more lets just say that the film documents the enacting of a search warrant by the FBI on the home of Georgia resident and NSA translator Reality Leigh Winner (Sydney Sweeney), with the script culled exclusively from the recorded transcripts of that event in June of 2017.

Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis do a fine job of playing the sweet-talking agents who approach the unsuspecting Reality as she arrives home that afternoon with her grocery shopping. Satter, meanwhile, does her best to convey the authenticity of her reenactment, cutting between takes of her actors and wav files of the recording to suggest a direct translation from audio to visual, with only a few encroaching dramatic motifs and flourishes embellishing her depiction of ‘the truth’.

That word might well get us and Reality into trouble as things unfurl. With her director aiming for a convincing take on, well, reality, it is up to Sweeney to centre this thing via a measured performance of slow and judicious accumulation, one that stands as a rebuke to her detractors.

First noticed by this viewer in Zu Quirke’s Welcome to the Blumhouse highlight Nocturne,  Sweeney has had to fight to be taken seriously in an industry which makes its judgements primarily on appearance. This has led to her candidly talking about asking Sam Levinson to edit down the amount of nudity prevalent for her character in Euphoria, while also commenting herself on the disparity between her notices for playing Cassie vs other roles, such as her efforts on the first season of The White Lotus.

If her worth needed any further reinforcement or justification, Reality is it. Sweeney is a true actor, mutating the pitch of her performance as guided by the roles she wins and her work here is subtle yet multi-faceted and astonishing. For much of the film’s svelte running time she underplays to match her co-stars, while Satter relies on the ripped-from-reality nature of the humdrum dialogue (time-wasting conversations about pets and CrossFit as the FBI make themselves her ‘pal’) to convince us of the film’s veracity.

It’s not until around an hour into this tense procedural that Satter makes some contentious audio/visual choices. Her film becomes a stark rebuke of censorship and, when sensitive subject matter becomes the topic of the FBI’s interrogation of Reality, Satter punctures the film with distortion, even daring to erase Sweeney from the frame completely. For the uninitiated it helps to perpetuate the sense of mystery at the heart of the piece. On top of this it sees form commenting on content. By nastily obliterating and interrupting her carefully filmed drama, Satter provokes the audience to begrudge her for doing so. In the process, we’re urged to side with Reality, who is now being painted as a kind of whistle-blower and representative of the uncensored truth.

Taking her cues from the tactics employed by the FBI, Satter milks the agents’ detours and deflections to instill a palpable sense of frustration and suspense. Here her film can be likened to the aforementioned How to Blow Up a Pipeline, in that it leans into conventional thriller techniques to sculpt something recognisable for a mass audience. But in truth it has more in common with Gus Van Sant’s Palme d’Or winning Elephant, particularly in how effectively Satter turns the extraordinary into something banal and the everyday into something imbued with suffocating malaise. When Reality loses her cool and starts to fret – again, perfectly calibrated by Sweeney – its entirely convincing because an identifiable aura of unrest has been brought to the boil.

There are some bold eleventh hour tricks deployed which may well divide viewers. Again, we’re talking audio/visual disruptions, but also sudden spikes in the pitch of certain performances. While these announce themselves loudly, they also correspond to emotional peaks for Satter’s focus; Reality. The character’s name is almost too perfect as Satter fragments her own deftly hewn reconstruction for volatile moments of subjective experience. The closing moments – ripped from actual TV news broadcasts after the fact – amount to the most conventional of the 83 minutes offered up here. A fine enough exit method, but nothing compared to the quietly riveting drama unfolding before it on a corner property in a rough neighbourhood in the middle of the working day.

This lightning-rod reenactment of an interrogation interrogates something else; patriotism. When a fleetingly idealist young woman is arrested for trying to maintain the values of democracy, and the agents of the government questioning her feel like the guard dogs of a suppressive autocratic state, where is the true patriotic conduct? Satter’s film doesn’t sit on the fence. It sides with its well-meaning, frustrated protagonist. Making this film – an adaptation of Satter’s own stage play – feels like a provocation to us all. A genuinely thrilling proposition in contemporary cinema.