Reality: the NSA whistleblower who ‘wasn’t trying to be a Snowden’
Reality, the coolly absorbing tale of a millennial whistleblower, starts with an overhead view of a nondescript office on the day Donald Trump fired FBI Chief James Comey: May 9 2017. Flat-screens on the wall show rolling reports on Fox News, but otherwise, an eerie quiet prevails. We’re not privy to the exact moment when something flipped inside Reality Leigh Winner (Sydney Sweeney), who’s seated in the shot, but it had to do with fury and a sense of powerlessness.
A month later, she was accosted by FBI agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis), who took her inside her home for questioning. She was slow to admit any wrongdoing; then admitted part of it; then tried to engage with their deepest concerns, about her motivation in leaking a classified NSA document to The Intercept, an online news source. “I wasn’t trying to be a Snowden or anything,” she remarked, in one of the most-publicised lines.
Giving us a precise sense of how her arrest went down is the film’s brief, and using the exact transcript of the FBI’s recordings is a foolproof way to go about it. Before conceiving it on camera, director Tina Satter adapted the same event into a piece of verbatim theatre, Is This a Room, which ran off-Broadway.
Reality transcends staginess as a strikingly well-realised piece of filmmaking, using judicious sound design and expressive lighting to gain a surreally vivid edge. When Winner mentions something that’s redacted on the page, Sweeney briefly vanishes on screen, leaving a light burst of digital debris – a nifty effect Satter doesn’t over-exploit.
Winner once worked for the US Air Force, and retained her security clearance when she became an NSA translator, fluent in Dari, Pashto and Farsi. She thought Americans were being intentionally misled about Russia’s election interference, and was moved to do something when she printed, then posted, the incriminating document. Handling methods by The Intercept, ironically, blew her anonymity, leading to her imprisonment for five years, with bail repeatedly denied.
Satter mounts Winner’s story as non-portentously as possible; indeed, it’s full of awkward humanity, quizzical compassion, and Feds fussing clumsily over what to do with her pets. Hamilton and Marchant, as guys fumbling though their jobs, sometimes overrating their own cool, are excellent. The film leaves the trace it intends, but moment by moment, it’s particularly strong as a showcase for Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus), who emanates a slippery shrewdness under her dazed glaze. She does Winner the justice of wearing her shoes without judgement, joining her in the assumption that no disclosure can be truly treasonous if the public deserve to know it.
In cinemas from June 2
