Legal transcripts have long provided rich source material for authentically gripping movies. Last year, the Tribeca festival showcased The Courtroom, a well-received deportation drama featuring “dialogue taken directly from court transcripts”. But it’s not just courtrooms that provide such inspiration. Think back to the “verbatim theatre” of Clio Barnard’s 2010 feature debut The Arbor, in which actors lip-synced recorded interviews about the troubled life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar. In the 2013 TV show Nixon’s the One, Harry Shearer reimagined Tricky Dicky’s secret audio tapes as video recordings, creating an absurdist black comedy from word-for-word Oval Office transcripts. More recently, James Spinney and Peter Middleton’s documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin (2021) added dramatised visuals to archived audio to bring the controversial cinema pioneer’s legend to life.
In 2019, playwright Tina Satter used the FBI transcript of an interview with NSA-contracted translator and US Air Force veteran Reality Leigh Winner as the basis of her verbatim play Is This a Room. On 3 June 2017, Winner had been accosted by two FBI agents, Justin C Garrick and R Wallace Taylor, outside her home in Augusta, Georgia. The agents, who recorded the encounter, told Winner they had a warrant to search her home arising from “the possible mishandling of classified information” – a violation of the 1917 Espionage Act. That same act would later be cited in an August 2022 warrant for Mar-a-Lago, the Florida residence of the former president for whom Russian military intelligence (according to a report leaked by Winner) had attempted to secure election victory in 2016. Yet while Teflon Don’s own classified documents scandal is still ongoing, it’s inconceivable that Trump will face anything like the harsh sanctions handed down to Winner in 2018.
Satter’s feature film debut, which she has adapted for the screen with co-writer James Paul Dallas, opens with the declaration that “the dialogue in this movie is taken entirely from the transcript of that [FBI] recording”. Sydney Sweeney, who excelled as the stroppy, manipulative Olivia Mossbacher in the first series of HBO’s black comedy White Lotus, is in altogether more vulnerable mode as Winner, who returns home to find Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchánt Davis) in her driveway. The agents’ manner is passive-aggressive, all fixed smiles and quietly threatening body language. They stress repeatedly that Winner’s cooperation is “completely voluntary” while also making it clear that she has little agency in the unfolding drama.
As for Winner, whose demeanour is a strange blend of amiable and unsettled, her primary concern is her pets: the cat who has hidden under the bed but may run out though an open door on to the road; the dog who will need to be penned before the agents can search the house. When Garrick quietly tells his partner that “she doesn’t know what’s going on”, it’s unclear whether he’s talking about the dog or their suspect.
There’s a palm-sweating tension between the veneer of geniality (small talk about rescue animals chewing furniture and groceries going into the refrigerator) and the escalation of the search procedure, ramped up by flash-frame images of the actual raid and surreal Twin Peaks-style visual ellipses during redacted portions of the transcript. When Winner, whose interstitial social media posts paint an unremarkable background picture, admits that the only private place in the house is a “weird” and “creepy” room behind the kitchen (she’s embarrassed because it’s dirty and unused), her descriptive terms seem entirely in keeping with the tenor of their conversation, as if the film was balancing precariously on the cusp of quotidian procedural, black comedy and shrieking horror.
Nathan Micay, series composer for BBC/HBO’s Industry, provides a pulsing score that lends a throb of impending disaster to even the most innocuous exchanges, fluttering between Brian Eno-esque ambience and the skin-crawling atonalities of Mica Levi’s sci-fi soundtrack for Under the Skin. At times, the air of awkwardness becomes almost unbearable, the artifice of the dramatic conceit (Pinteresque pauses, coughs and stutters; cinematographer Paul Yee’s unforgiving strip-lit interiors) highlighting the gap between civility and catastrophe, climaxing in Winner’s almost oddly matter-of-fact question: “Am I going to jail tonight?”
Bookended by the vile blather of Fox News, in response to which Winner was pushed to act, Reality is a stranger-than-fiction reminder of the precarious times in which we live, and of what happens when individuals challenge authorities less troubled by truth than retribution.
