After reading the transcript of whistleblower Reality Winner’s interrogation by the FBI on June 3, 2017, playwright Tina Satter thought, “This is a play.” It might sound like an odd takeaway, but the ensuing stage production, Is This a Room, hit Broadway in 2021 to positive reviews and ultimately led Satter to her feature directorial debut. And after watching Satter’s adaptation of her play, now titled Reality, it is startling to see just how well an FBI transcript could translate to a fascinating three-act narrative. On a summer day in 2017, then-25-year-old Winner, a former Air Force pilot and translator for the NSA, was interrogated at her home by two male FBI agents without ever having been read her Miranda rights. In Reality, it’s clear that the story that unfolds not only works as entertainment fodder but, carefully and with steadily amplified tension, observes gendered dynamics and the very sort of implicit government corruption that could lead someone who once worked for the system to turn her back against it.
But it’s hard to discern exactly what there is to be gained from having transferred the medium from theater to film. I had never read the transcript nor seen Satter’s play, so I did find having this piece of history articulated to me with words and visuals useful. But a film can’t just be that: Base level information, that I otherwise could have read as a transcript, spoon-fed to me. The dialogue-heavy, one-location nature of an interrogation has more obvious utility as a play, where the real-time, live aspect of the form allows for a sense of complete immersion in this scenario. In film, time is bent to the will of the filmmaker, but Satter seems more interested in mimicking one form for another instead of stretching her wings as a director.
At the end of Reality, we learn that when FBI agents Taylor (Josh Hamilton) and Garrick (Marchánt Davis) surprised Winner (Sydney Sweeney) at her home, she genuinely wasn’t sure who they were and what they wanted. That changed as soon as they introduced themselves. From there, Winner understands what’s at stake, but she plays it cool. Insanely cool, even. For most of the film, Winner stays impressively collected, personable and laidback under pressure; one has to assume an effect of having served in the military. “I want to make this as easy for you guys as possible,” is one of the first things Winner says to the men.
From Winner’s Kia Soul down into her vacant back room—an empty, cream-colored box behind her house that she always found creepy—Reality’s story becomes a contemplative chase of cat and mouse, as Taylor and Garrick gradually corner the young woman through curiosity and superficial friendliness that slowly reveals itself. We learn that the agents are not necessarily trying to elicit a confession from Winner. In fact, they have everything they need to arrest her. They know the single classified document that she printed on voter meddling efforts in the 2016 election by the Russian military. They know what she did with it and the news organization that she leaked it to. As a recreated phone call between Winner and her sister Brittany discloses, the agents just wanted to know why.
It makes the song and dance that Winner had to endure on the men’s behalf—further compounded by the obvious gross negligence of the agents who failed to read Winner her rights and offer her legal representation before interrogating her—all the more misogynistic and suffocating. The presence of the men in Winner’s home is deeply felt; ironically, even her dog doesn’t like men, she tells them jokingly. When Taylor, Garrick and Winner gather into the back room for the ultimate interrogation, there’s a safe distance between the men and Winner that is progressively closed as they encroach upon her. The adaptation alters the arrest to be just as focused on the historic day a defector was imprisoned as on the dynamics between men in positions of power and the women facing them.
Ultimately, the recreation of real peoples’ words from an audio recording strikes as redundant and uninspired with Is This a Room transforming into Reality. In a play, where acting craft is more heavily accentuated, it makes sense to have actors add visual emotion to an event we could otherwise only read and hear. But acting is not the sole driver of film, and the failure of Reality to play around further with the foundation built by Is This a Room is less the fault of shifting mediums than that of their director. I’m undecided if Satter could have done anything to salvage this particular scenario for film, but it’s clear that she didn’t quite possess the innovation to attempt it—even if Sweeney’s portrayal of Winner is captivating. Sweeney masters a calculating and naturalistic performance carried entirely by subtle physicalities. It adds an unmistakable layer of depth to her skills, which, while present in each role she’s taken on in her growing Hollywood star, could be easier for some to write off when showcased on a soapy series like Euphoria.
But aside from Sweeney’s performance—and in addition to the unnerving presences of Hamilton and Davis—Satter does very little to transcend one medium to another. While being questioned in the back room, we see shots of the other government agents rifling through Winner’s belongings, and of Winner’s two pets, the dog left in its outside pen and a cat tied to the leg of a chest of drawers in her bedroom. It’s an obvious visual metaphor for their owner’s own entrapment, but it’s not terribly creative visual language; nor are the glitchy, VFX disappearances of Winner and the agents within their respective frames when they reach the sections of the transcript with classified information. Along with recreated flashbacks leading up to the day Winner mailed the document, that’s about as far as this revision goes towards playing with its new form—though, DP Paul Yee does the most. Enhanced by a creeping score from Nathan Micay, Yee’s camera works with the confines of the narrow locale to make Winner’s home feel simultaneously expansive and smothering.
As was similarly criticized with Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, another cinematic reworking of a stage production, it’s not enough to simply bring a play in front of a camera, as what Satter seems to have largely done with Reality. It’s obvious that filmmaking and theater are different artforms that have their own unique strengths and limitations, and they should be properly explored and, ideally, expanded upon when transitioning from one to the other. There’s a reason that Satter knew Winner’s transcript would succeed as a play, but she brings very little that’s new and exciting as a film director of that same narrative. If Reality works, it’s because its heroine already did most of that work six years ago.
Director: Tina Satter
Writer: Tina Satter, James Paul Dallas
Starring: Sydney Sweeney, Marchánt Davis, Josh Hamilton
Release Date: May 29, 2023
Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.