The title of the film Reality clearly refers to the main character. Reality Winner is a U.S. military veteran and translator whose high-level security clearance helped her land a job with a company contracted by the U.S. government. While working there, she leaked documents that demonstrated that the Trump administration was misleading the public about Russian meddling in the 2016 election. She saw it as valuable whistleblowing. The government’s view that was that it was just a felony. First-time feature filmmaker Tina Satter, adapting her own theatrical work, also holds the title as a mandate as to how she should approach her storytelling. Every line of dialogue in the film is taken verbatim from the FBI transcripts of the day they showed up at Winner’s Georgia home to question and arrest her. The journalistic rigor of the narrative doesn’t nullify its sense of drama. Under Satter’s guidance, Reality is consistently riveting and visually elegant. She doesn’t press to make scenes more dynamic than they should be, confident that the slowly ratcheting tension will be potent enough, albeit with a couple instances of Rashomon-like hinting at the heightened way Winner perceives the authority figures bearing down on her. If Satter’s remarkably command of cinematic syntax is invaluable to the film’s success, so to is Sydney Sweeney’s startlingly strong performance as Reality Winner. Sweeney subtly shows how anxiety is roiling within Reality as she strains to put a guise of casual innocence and expertly has that brave face flake away with every new probing question posed. Satter might draw heavily on the documented event she depicts, but her intellectually vigorous technique is a reminder that even reality is open to interpretation.