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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Sydney Sweeney Is Unreally Great in Reality - Vulture

Reality is built from the transcript of an actual interrogation that took place on June 3, 2017 — one that two FBI agents subjected a 25-year-old military contractor named Reality Winner to in her home in Augusta, Georgia, shortly before her arrest. To be a regular viewer of movies and TV is to be bombarded with so many fictional versions of similar scenarios that watching a recreation of a real one feels disorienting. In some ways, the film has the convenient contours of a procedural drama, in that Winner doesn’t demand a lawyer the way you start to really wish she had, and that she ultimately confesses to having leaked a classified NSA report on Russian interference in the 2016 elections to a media outlet. But the conversation that slowly closes its jaws around Winner is also so banal, filled with small talk about CrossFit and rescue dogs in between intense questions about national security. You’re watching someone’s life get crushed, but like Winner herself, it takes a while to understand that because this encounter is its own kind of performance, one in which everyone tries, out of calculation or hope, to pretend what’s happening is not a big deal.

Reality is a knockout of a film debut from writer-director Tina Satter, but it was an experimental play first, one that Satter premiered off Broadway in 2019 and then, miraculously, on it in 2021. While the theater version, named Is This a Room after a background agent’s line, took place on a nearly bare stage, the film is...



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