At The Movies: Elemental flames out, Reality grips

Elemental (PG13)

109 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars

The story: In Pixar Animation’s Element City, a metropolis home to human-like communities of fire, water, air and earth, a fiery girl and a go-with-the-flow aqua dude develop a taboo relationship.

Elemental is an immigrant allegory drawn from Korean-American writer-director Peter Sohn’s (The Good Dinosaur, 2015) experiences of growing up in 1970s New York City – this much is clear.

But why the elements for story characters, even if these coldly abstract matter do inspire some fanciful designs?

Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis) of Fire Town is a flickering flame, the daughter of a Fireland emigre (Ronnie del Carmen) who has built a new life for himself and his wife (Shila Ommi), as well as a neighbourhood bodega he hopes to pass down to their beloved child. Ember has to first learn to tame her combustible temper, as it frightens customers away.

Spilling out of the piping system into her shop one day is goofy, gelatinous building inspector Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) from the affluent water borough across the city.

Together, they must locate and plug the plumbing leak before her ghetto gets doused, defying the preconceptions of fire vapourising water and water extinguishing fire to emotionally connect along the way.

The more touching and tender love is between Ember and her elderly dad. The conceit behind this interracial romance-adventure is as strained as the social commentary on xenophobia, assimilation, class division and generational duty – how could Ember betray her family by falling for an outsider? – is simplistic.

And, for all of the animators’ vibrant world-building set against Thomas Newman’s pan-Asian score, there are no significant air personalities, while the earth character is a tree-stump boy who, bizarrely, sprouts armpit daisies.

Hot take: It is true, the elements do not mix. This multicultural fable is a hodgepodge of obvious metaphors.

Reality (PG13)

82 minutes, available on HBO Go
4 stars

The story: On June 3, 2017, a 25-year-old United States military contractor (Sydney Sweeney) in Augusta, Georgia, returns home to two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents waiting in her driveway. She is questioned for over an hour in a spare back room, and arrested for leaking to the media a classified file confirming Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

Reality is named after the real-life whistleblower Reality Winner, who is serving a five-year sentence for treason, as well as a declaration of intent.

This single-room three-character chamber drama is a real-time re-enactment of the interrogation, with dialogue pulled word-for-word from the FBI’s taped transcript.

Sweeney, from the HBO series Euphoria (2019 to present), is a revelation as Winner, by all appearances a girl-next-door yoga instructor in cut-off shorts, while Josh Hamilton and Marchant Davis as the agents are a practiced double act in menacing faux bonhomie. They make small talk – about pets, her overweight cat, their CrossFit regimen.

The banality is surreal, but it is, of course, a feint for the suspect (is she lying?) and the inquisitors (how much do they know?) to size each other up.

Winner has said her alleged act of espionage was motivated by a patriotic duty to tell the American people the truth.

Award-winning playwright and director Tina Satter, in adapting her 2019 verbatim theatre piece Is This A Room for this film, attempts no political editorialising.

Her clinical precision heightens the eerie hyper-reality as Winner gradually comes to accept the game is up and her world is over. She twitches, flushes, then cracks under the feds’ intimidating state power. Sweeney’s performance of incremental dread is stomach-churning.

Hot take: A taped report is expertly turned into a chilling and transfixing true-crime thriller.