Tina Satter stages the FBI’s questioning of Reality Winner word for word, and the small talk about pets and gym classes frightens more than any shouting could. Sydney Sweeney is quietly remarkable; the flourishes around her are the one thing we would cut.
Tina Satter has made a film out of a document. On 3 June 2017 two FBI agents recorded their conversation with Reality Winner at her house, and the transcript is the whole of the script. Satter and her co-writer James Paul Dallas have not invented a line; they have arranged what was said and kept the gaps where the government blacked words out. Satter staged the same material first as a play, and Reality, her first film, keeps the play’s rule. If it was not said that afternoon, nobody says it.
The first twenty minutes are about where to sit. Agent Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Agent Taylor (Marchánt Davis) have a search warrant and a team of men in polo shirts who start going through the house. Reality (Sydney Sweeney) has just got back from the shops and asks them not to let the cat out. Garrick asks about her dog. Somebody has to find a room where they can talk, and the one they settle on is at the back, bare, with a dirty carpet and nothing in it but boxes. We were more uncomfortable in that empty room than in most interrogation scenes we can think of, because nobody raises their voice and for a long time nobody says what she is suspected of.
Hamilton is the film’s best decision after Sweeney. Garrick is a big, easy man who talks about his own dogs and his time in the service, and keeps being pleasant well past the point where pleasant means anything. Davis, as Taylor, stands mostly to one side, writes things down and says less, and the two of them never once play bad cop. Sweeney has less to do than the reviews suggest and does more with it. Reality is 25, ex-Air Force, keeps a pink rifle in the house, and answers every question with a small helpful smile. Paul Yee shoots her close, so we spend most of the film on her face while she works out, a question at a time, how much they already know. The change happens in her eyes and the set of her mouth. There are no speeches, because the transcript did not contain any.
Tommy Love’s production design puts her in a small rented house with the shopping still in bags on the counter, the sort of place nobody sets a thriller in, and the film is better for it. Ron Dulin and Jennifer Vecchiarello cut long stretches inside that bare back bedroom, then break the pattern with a shot of the transcript itself, the words we have just heard typed out on a page. The first time it happened we felt slightly sick, because it turned the scene in front of us into a record. By the fourth or fifth time it was a nudge, as if Satter did not trust us to remember.
That is the film’s weakness, and it is not a large one. Wherever the transcript has been redacted, Satter makes the picture stutter and the actor drop out of the frame for the length of the missing words. It is a clever idea and it is right the first time. Repeated, it looks like a trick. Nathan Micay’s electronic score keeps out of the way for an hour and then, in the closing stretch, comes in as a throb the scene does not need; the words were doing the work already. Benny Elledge plays a man the transcript never managed to identify, listed as Unknown Male, and we laughed at how the film treats him, standing about the house with no name. It is the one laugh in the film.
Satter also cuts in clips of cable news, Tucker Carlson and Bill Maher among them, and the real Reality Winner appears in archive footage. Those clips tell you where the story went, and we will not. The film’s interest is the hour before any of that, when a young woman is still offering to help and two polite men are letting her. The film it most resembles is Compliance, Craig Zobel’s 2012 drama about a fast-food manager who does what a voice on the phone tells her to. Reality is the harder watch, because the men giving the instructions here are real, and reasonable, and within their rights.
At 83 minutes and a 12A it is short enough for a weeknight, and it will follow you to bed. Watch it with the lights off and the phone in another room. You will not want anything else in the house recording.
