‘Winner’: Sundance Review

Dir: Susanna Fogel. US/Canada. 2024. 103mins

National Security Agency translator Reality Winner was jailed for five years for revealing US secrets about the Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election – a sentence that was intended to make an example of her. She may not be a household name outside her homeland, even though she was also the subject of Sonia Kennebeck’s 2021 documentary Reality and Tina Satter’s more traditional HBO drama Reality last year Yet no prior knowledge is needed to enjoy this character-focused take on her story.

 A pacy, comedy-inflected and personality-driven take on Winner’s story

Director Susanna Fogel returns to the Premieres section of Sundance just a year after her previous film Cat Person screened there. This time, co-writing with journalist and debut scriptwriter Kerry Howley (who penned the 2017 ’New York Magazine article on which this is based), she avoids the usual, highly serious cloak and dagger tradition of whistleblower films in favour of a pacy, comedy-inflected and personality-driven take on Winner’s story. All of which might make it a challenging sell, with more serious audiences considering it too lightweight, but if mainstream crowds can be encouraged to see past the apparently serious topic then they will find much to enjoy.

The tone is obvious from the start; a title card has a subtitle in brackets, which reads ’Based on Reality’. An obvious pun on the translator’s birth name, it also gives a steer as to the direction the action is going in – which is to put its subject front and centre and offer us a chance to climb into her headspace. Quirky voice-over from Reality (Coda’s Emilia Jones, who also starred in Cat Person) reinforces this, as we are thrust back to her childhood (where she is played by Annelise Pollmann).

Out to buy a dog as a birthday present for her sister Brittany (Avery Peters, replaced by Kathryn Newton in adulthood), we see their stay-at-home intellectual dad Ron (Zach Galifianakis) delivering a few home truths about pet shop pups, much to the frustration of their mum Billie (Connie Britton). Reality decides to become a champion of the underdogs, in a show of forthright spontaneity that will be carried forward into her adult life. From domestic scenes as the girls grow into young women, it is evident that, while Brittany is more of a kindred spirit of their social worker mum, Reality believes, like her father, that “we all need a hill to die on”.

Fogel keeps the film motoring at a clip as we see the highly intelligent Reality has already taught herself Arabic before she leaves school – something seen as a virtue as the US Air Force attempts to woo her, but as a strike against her when the authorities turn on her later in the film. Fogel repeatedly shows that it is not that Reality’s actions are ambiguous in themselves, but that they are open to interpretation if they are taken out of context. The fim successfully trades on this saint/sinner dichotomy.

After Reality signs up to the military, we are again invited to share her experience of the world. She makes OCD bargains with herself as the body count mounts as a result of her translations. Thoughts of a family of five and others who have died in a drone strike she instigated tumble through her voiced thoughts, together with deals along the lines of, ’If I can do 200 push-ups I’m still a good person’.  Although the tone is light, there is a serious undernote as Fogel invites us to consider what sort of toll this long-distance killing takes on people far from a warzone. 

“You’ve got to turn off your brain,” her boyfriend Andre (Danny Ramirez) tells her, but it is evident that Reality only deals in trade-offs not switch-offs. The NSA job and the crime that goes with it come late in the film, by which time we have really had a chance to get to know Reality and her foibles – making the injustices of what comes next hit home surprisingly hard.

While some of the details of the politics and the case feel rather skimmed over, the characters increasingly come into their own, with Galifianakis providing a surprising amount of soulfulness and Britton showing Billie’s steely side. The film’s general comic tone makes its darker moments stand out; falling foul of the US government is no laughing matter.