Reality

Tina Satter adapts her stage play Is This a Room into a suspenseful single-location three-hander starring Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, and Marchánt Davis. The play is based on the FBI interrogation of American intelligence leaker Reality Winner, with all of the dialogue taken verbatim from the transcript. The film opens the play up slightly and stages the events in and around the titular character's home. The three leads and the additional FBI agents on site all deliver the dialogue exactly as recorded on the day, including every pause, false start, and mispronunciation. How redacted words and sentences are represented is even more dramatic than how they were handled on stage. Satter and co-screenwriter James Paul Dallas take full advantage of the limitations of time and space, and their strict adherence to the transcript gives the proceedings a tension that would never be present otherwise. Reality never feels gimmicky; it's an 82-minute reminder to never talk to the cops (or the feds) without first calling a lawyer.