Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/HBO
Traitor or patriot—that’s the question lingering over Reality, writer/director Tina Satter’s HBO film adaptation of her Broadway play Is This a Room? about a whistleblower on the cusp of arrest. Its title is both the name of its protagonist and a reference to the nature of its tale, and Reality is a stagey dramatization about the flimsy line separating truth from lies, honor from treachery. Though its real-life story ultimately proves a little too one-note, it makes up for its thinness with a powerhouse lead turn from Sydney Sweeney as a woman caught in a nerve-wracking mess of her own making.
Its dialogue taken directly from transcripts of FBI interviews and recordings (and sometimes simultaneously depicted on-screen), Reality is set over the course of approximately two hours on June 3, 2017, at the small, one-level brick home of National Security Agency translator Reality Winner (Sweeney) in a not-very-nice section of Augusta, Georgia.
Arriving at the house with groceries in tow, Winner is greeted by Wally (Marchánt Davis) and Justin (Josh Hamilton). They’re both FBI agents, and they have a warrant to search Winner’s residence, her car, and her person—including her phone, which they request while still on the front lawn. Wearing, respectively, a short-sleeved checkerboard button-down (Justin) and an Under Armor polo shirt (Wallace) that are tucked into matching khaki pants, the men affect cheery casualness. Nonetheless, it’s clear from the get-go that this is not an informal meeting.