Reality

When two FBI agents questioned 25-year-old former American intelligence specialist Reality Winner about possible mishandling of classified information back in 2017, the resulting interaction played out like a gripping scene of experimental theater. At least, that’s how filmmaker Tina Satter read it. Riveting, funny, absurd, and tense throughout, the transcript of Winner’s interrogation soon became the actual script for Satter’s HBO film Reality. Not quite presenting itself as an authentic facsimile of what transpired at Reality’s house that day, nor embracing its own fictional trappings, this Sydney Sweeney-starring vehicle is a discomfiting dramatization that refuses to pin down its central figure nor what she’s come to mean to the media and critics on both sides of the partisan divide. Instead, the film constantly nudges us to see how the very gaps in our knowledge about what happened that day—not to mention the day Winner absconded with highly confidential documents—are precisely where that elusive concept of “truth” lies. For challenging viewers with a gripping dramatization of real-life events that eschews traditional attempts to explain personal and political motivations, and encouraging us to find in such frictions the very essence of storytelling in a post-truth era, Reality wins a Peabody Award.