Experienced American playwright Tina Satter presented herself in Berlin with an intriguing combination of thriller and drama, for whom “Reality” was the first film she shot. It is the film that begins rather confusingly and quite confusingly, even a bit frustratingly because some details that seem crucial are blurred or rather classified since the film was made according to the audio recording of the real event. Since “Reality” is a film that is best to dive into with as little prior knowledge as possible about the action itself, almost nothing is clear to us in the beginning. Except that the name “Reality” does not refer to a reality show, but the main protagonist’s parents were apparently quite imaginative, so they gave her the name Reality, and to make things even more incredible, her last name is Winner.
And Reality was embodied by the young star Sydney Sweeney, who was remembered by all those who watched the series “Euphoria” or the first season of “The White Lotus”, and here she is in a fundamentally different role. We first see her working in an office in Georgia and watching the news on Fox News about how then President Donald Trump fired the then head of the FBI. The time of the action is the spring of 2017, and one day after returning home, she will be met at the door by two guys who pose as FBI agents and have a warrant to search her house and her property. From the beginning, Reality behaves very strangely, as if the arrival of FBI agents is the most normal thing and she talks to them and does not seem particularly surprised, and slowly we understand the reasons not only for who she is, but also why they came.
We understand that Reality actually works for a government agency or secret service, was in the Air Force, and is now a translator from some Asian languages for the National Security Agency (NSA). While she is talking to two agents, new agents break into her house, digging through things, looking for something, and Reality slowly realizes that she is in serious trouble. What exactly and why, you will have to find out for yourself, because anything further would be a terrible spoiler, just like Googling her name, since Satter made the film in such a way that previous knowledge can greatly damage the entire concept of the story.
The story that developed until the end was even interesting and I liked the way Satter structured the story, and she filmed “Reality” based on the controversial play she staged a few years earlier. It is the film that opens up some interesting questions and in the end one has to imagine what is actually a bigger and more serious problem, what Reality allegedly did or the fact that she will find herself in serious problems because of it. Although we will understand by the end that we have already had the opportunity to watch relatively similar stories, it is precisely the structure of this film that makes it special, unusual, even original.