From her own play Is This a Room, Tina Satter has written and directed a compelling three-hander chamber piece based upon the FBI transcript of the arrest and interrogation of leaker Reality Winner, who was given one of the longest prison terms for her crimes that America has ever known. The story and the transcript is very intriguing material and in the already well accomplished hands of Satter, the film itself stands as a very compelling and tense piece of work.
This tense and
confined chamber piece is as much a verbatims piece as it is a conceptual
deconstruction of the allowances and restrictions that can occur in making and
presenting verbatim work. Satter’s already well conceived play has grown into a
tense and solid little true life thriller that has three brilliant actors doing
great work and has been shot and edited as such that the complexities and
banalities of this sort of interrogation all come to life in gripping fashion. Satter’s
direction is specific and removed and often without flourish, presenting a cold
and clinical view of things that unsettles the viewer as much as our
interrogators are trying to relax Reality and in turn the audience. The editing
and conceptual choices regarding how such things as redactions and the like are
rendered on screen was the biggest thing I butted against personally, with the
glitching and the blurring just seeming a little cheap and unaffecting,
especially in comparison to the composure and skill of Satter’s hand during the
rest of the film. The three chief actors in this film are perhaps its strongest
asset, with Sydney Sweeney as the titular Reality and with Josh Hamilton and
Marchant Davis as the two chief agents in the three-hander central chamber
piece of the film. Hamilton and Marchant are both as unsettling and deliberate
as each other, with Hamilton taking the edge overall by the virtue of the fact
that his agent takes the more probing aspects, with Marchant perfect as the
colder ‘good cop’ for lack of a better term. However this film really is a
testament to Sweeney, who delivers here a beautifully vulnerable and anxious
performance. It’s complex work and it’s rather riveting to watch. As a matter
of fact this is a more than apt description of Satter’s film as a whole;
complex and riveting work. Overall the film stumbles in all ways that verbatim pieces
do, with interest and stranger than fiction elements not always in abundance to
make for a fully entertaining picture. However in regards to verbatim pieces of
fiction as a whole, this is certainly one of the better ones I have seen in a
sub-genre that I in simple terms; so frequently malign.
A tight thrilling 7/10 piece of verbatim that compels its audience and avoids the many pitfalls that I personally find verbatim pieces to fall into so often. Perhaps this is just naturally bizarre and compelling dialogue in itself, which of course it is, however Tina Satter goes beyond the spoken word and infuses a variety of visual elements and concepts to make this a very intriguing film indeed. Bolster this foundation with three exceptional performances and you have a really solid, if a little slight, film on your hands.
P.S. Beyond previous work and beyond Zendaya, it’s looking like the breakouts from Euphoria, despite by any standard definition them all being breakouts, is going to be a tougher road than we thought. But this film proves a lane for Sweeney in more projects than she may be reduced to.
P.P.S. I know it’s her real name, but to be rude the worst part of this movie was that her name was Reality and that every time it just sounded like an incredibly lame piece of conceptual writing, especially with how this film plays with truth and distortion at it’s core. And yes, I know that that may be one of the more stupid ‘P.S’s I’ve ever written.
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Thomas Carruthers
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