Reality: a suffocating film whose end you will never guess (yet very real)

Who said that in the cinema summer is synonymous with desert?

This Wednesday, August 16, we discovered Sydney Sweeney, the revelation ofEuphoria in a bizarre thriller that captivated us every second for 82 minutes.

For its device that obfuscates the distinction between fiction and documentary and unlike any other, its end you will not see comingand his actress who turns out to have a thousand faces, Reality is the best film in theaters this week.

Reality, what is it about?

On June 3, 2017, Reality Winner, twenty-five years old she is interrogated by two FBI agents at her home.

This mundane and sometimes surreal conversation, with every dialogue taken from the authentic transcript of the interrogation, paints a complex portrait of an American millennial, US Air Force veteran, yoga teacher, who loves animals, travels and shares photos on social networks.

Why is the FBI interested in her? Who is really the Reality?

The devil is in the details

A thriller is rarely as chilling as when it’s based on the minimalism the most extreme.

In Realitythat will pretty much be enough three actors and empty room of a small house in the suburbs in which to immerse ourselves a stubborn anxiety and let us experiment the madness of American imperialism and its contradictionson a human scale.

Reality is based on a creepy device. Each line of dialogue is taken from the actual transcript of the interrogation Reality Winner underwent at his home in 2018. From this raw documentary material, director Tina Satter reconstructs the scene before our eyes, almost in real time. If this fidelity to reality is also disturbing, it is precisely… Because we don’t understand each other.

Forget the hordes of menacing agents, the aggressive, heavily armed thugs who refuse to cooperate: what is unfolding before our eyes is baffling banality. There’s just a 25-year-old woman, who looks absolutely harmless and normal. Sure, men come to Reality in groups. They take her phone, ask her where her guns are (we are in the United States, so the fact that she has guns is not an issue for them…), they check her house.

However, they look pretty friendly. Innocently, they discuss everything and nothing: reality’s animals, her yoga classes, life in the suburbs. They mention, in passing, that she is fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, congratulating her on her career – at just 25 she works as a linguist for the army and has ambitions of joining the special forces.

This is the whole paradox of this strange character: lady all while being gifted, Is reality a manipulator? What it looks like so normal, simple, committed to serving her country, is she hiding something?

Nailed by a scene and dialogues where every word, every smile, every look seems to hide a violent truth but imperceptiblewe wonder: what is the crime of which Reality is accused?

Truth, crime and power

And if this strange discussion, on horseback THE Chatter and the interrogation Was that how FBI agents get the information they seek? Or worse : information they already have but pretend to ignorewaiting for reality to end, like an exhausted rat caught in a traphas tell them what they want to hear.

The interrogation continues in a room where Reality is isolated with two agents. This time the threat is more perceptible, without us fully understanding what is at stake. The young woman is cornered by the two men. The more questions they ask her, the more we feel the anguish of the frame tightening on the young woman, between these bare walls, and this stressful music that suggests the worst. A disturbingly versatile actress, Sydney Sweeney lets us experiment tiredness and anxiety unstoppable rise in character.

Very quickly we understand that the interest of the film does not lie in the fact that it has been able to reconstruct a real event, but in the way Tina Satter lets us experience the intertwining of power and information management.

With their methods that feign familiarity for better lie and manipulateFBI agents don’t only part of a much larger, contradictory and unjust system: the American government. Like these men of dubious methods, this power cheated, distorts reality, lieswhile claiming to justice, freedom and truth. This is why he does not hesitate to keep terror on those who fight for the truth.

Before the final revelation, abhorrent and revoltingthe director puts us in the place of a young woman who experiences the madness of this diet physically and mentallyby signing an experience of female gauze original and a film about a news story that deserves your full attention.

Do you like our articles? You will love our newsletters! Sign up for free on this page.