Reality stars Sydney Sweeney as the titular and perhaps ironically (if not bizarrely) named Reality Winner, a real-life NSA whistleblower who leaked information confirming Russia’s involvement in hacking and manipulation of the US presidential election back in 2016. Playing out almost in real-time, Reality is based upon the transcribed conversations between the twenty-something woman and the FBI agents who arrived on her doorstep less than a month after she decided to print out and mail a confidential in-house National Security Agency report to a newspaper.
Predicated upon its central performance, the genius of the film is in its slow-burn, anxiety-producing game of cat and mouse between Reality and her interrogators, cornering her at her house, asking her question after question about her involvement in the leak, a line of question they only arrive at after careful and measured accommodated of Reality as a suspect. Sweeney plays Reality as a naive but entirely sympathetic individual, a woman who, like the rest of us, simply got fed up with the lies and bullshit perpetrated by Trump and his Fox-news lackeys and wanted to set the record straight. Echoing that moment from Silence of the Lambs where Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling is confronted by an all-male mob of condescending police officers staring her down, the power imbalance at play in the unfolding interrogation is made all the more unnerving by the physically commanding and hyper-masculine FBI ‘bros’ who keep the slight Reality ensnared in the empty back room of her home. I began the film not knowing anything about the case or the real-world individual, but in its short 80-minute runtime – combining its central dramatic reenactment alongside images of the real Reality and official documentation – the director Tina Satter sells the importance of the titular woman as a victim of the US government’s over-powered surveillance system in a manner that operates somewhere between conventional thriller and investigatory documentary.
It would be wrong, however, to call this a ‘documentary’ in the more formal sense of the word, even if it is predominantly concerned with a specific historical event, its causes and effects, and the verisimilitude proffered by the film’s engagement with the official record. Building upon the first half of the film’s foundational realist aesthetic are moments of sudden digital erasure as the detail of the case becomes, ironically, clearer. Touching upon still-classified information in their conversation, both Reality and the FBI agents momentarily disappear from the camera’s view like immaterial ghosts, becoming a redacted element within the film’s mise-en-scène. The first occurrence of this is deeply disturbing, taking the established conventions of the hitherto realist drama and turning it on its head as a character suddenly disappears, a shot of the now empty room behind where they stood now signifying the remaining absences within the historical record.
The ‘reality’ of this event, the film shows, is only known up to a certain point, and we the viewer (as stand-ins for the entire American populace) are only ever able to understand a fraction of the detail, the ‘truth’ of the matter still kept behind lock and key by the NSA and other government agencies. Reality ultimately prompts the question: what do we know to be real or true? To what extent can we really believe the narratives and claims put forward as ‘reality’ by the supposedly official record and click-bait client journalism less interested in ethical integrity and speaking ‘truth to power’ than stirring up anger and division?
Notes from the Multiplex 