Reality Winner

Kennebeck’s documentary offers a more sympathetic, thought-provoking version of what motivated Winner’s actions and the morality of whistleblowing.

United States vs. Reality Winner is less expose than repudiation of a system that lacks the humanity to address the subtleties of her case.

Following the events that led up to Winner’s arrest––including recordings of conversations between Winner and agents who stopped by for a friendly chat, along with the efforts of her loving family to advocate on her behalf–– Kennebeck again has crafted an often riveting exploration of the state of national security.

It’s an involving, empathetic if one-sided portrait.

The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film. That it achieves those goals while relying tediously on almost all of the genre’s most overused formal devices, offering shockingly little variation from countless other docs you’ve seen on similar subjects, makes it a so-so film.

This review isn’t to say Winner is a “good or bad” person or that her actions were “good or bad.” This review is to say that the movie about Winner and her case is bad.c