Reality review – palm-sweatingly tense whistleblower drama

Tina Satter’s verbatim film about the FBI’s interrogation of US intelligence leaker Reality Winner, played by The White Lotus’s Sydney Sweeney, is a stranger-than-fiction reflection of our precarious timesLegal transcripts have long provided rich source material for authentically gripping movies.

Last year, the Tribeca festival showcased The Courtroom, a well-received deportation drama featuring “dialogue taken directly from court transcripts”.

But it’s not just courtrooms that provide such inspiration.

Think back to the “verbatim theatre” of Clio Barnard’s 2010 feature debut The Arbor, in which actors lip-synced recorded interviews about the troubled life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar.

In the 2013 TV show Nixon’s the One, Harry Shearer reimagined Tricky Dicky’s secret audio tapes as video recordings, creating an absurdist black comedy from word-for-word Oval Office transcripts.

More recently, James Spinney and Peter Middleton’s documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin (2021) added dramatised visuals to archived…

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