‘Reality’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Is Outstanding as Whistleblower Reality Winner in a Clever, Gripping Docudrama

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang In the widely covered story of the U.S. intelligence operative harshly sentenced in 2018 for leaking a confidential report on Russian election interference to The Intercept, the accidental (in)appropriateness of the operative’s name was always an eyecatching detail.

Could one of recent reality’s most highly public losers actually be called Reality Winner? Playwright Tina Satter’s enormously compelling film-directing debut adds another layer of cosmic irony to that nominative determinism.

In using the title “Reality,” and being scripted verbatim from exchanges recorded by the FBI during Winner’s 2017 surprise interrogation, Satter not only vividly revisits the story, she also makes us question the very relationship between a narrative film and the truth it claims to expose.

Reality can be stranger than fiction, but “Reality” fuses the two to become stranger, and more riveting, still. One major, electrifying connection between the facts of the case and their dramatization is provided by a revelatory Sydney Sweeney, playing Winner so convincingly that it’s hard to remember her as the sardonic, pampered teen in “The White Lotus,’ or the nice-girl-turned-nasty in “Euphoria.” From the moment Winner, an ex-USAF Airman fluent in Farsi, Pashto and Dari and working as a translator for an NSA contractor, arrives back to her small house in Augusta, Ga., to discover the FBI waiting for her, Sweeney’s every flicker of emotion, micro-reaction, evasion and retraction, is utterly believable.