Mubi Monday: Reality+ (2014, Short)

A decade before “The Substance”, Coralie Fargeat explored similar chilling themes of beauty and identity in her sci-fi short “Reality+”.

Subversive French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat has been making waves in the film community, rightfully so, following the wild success of her smartly satirical, feminist body horror masterpiece The Substance.

A decade prior, Fargeat’s striking short film Reality+ laid the groundwork for her recent tour de force, introducing similar visual elements and thought-provoking themes she’d later explore with such style and ferocity in her critically lauded 2024 feature film.

While Reality+ isn’t the scathing and wickedly funny feminist takedown of the beauty industry that The Substance is—with its pointed commentary on aging, Hollywood exploitation, and the commodification of female bodies—it does have some compelling things to say about identity, perception, authenticity, and body image in the age of social media and manufactured personas.

Released in 2014, this French-language, 22-minute sci-fi short takes the idea of the false image we so often construct on social media—with heavily filtered and Photoshopped representations of our ideal rather than real self—and examines its real-life ramifications.

In the futuristic world of Reality+, technology has advanced to allow users to take their mask of perfection into the real world.

A chip is inserted that allows users to live in an alternate reality where they can control how others see them.

Once the implant is installed, a user can build their own perfect self from a menu of cookie-cutter model-esque faces and sculpted bodies—eerily reminiscent of modern generative AI’s interpretation of formulaic beauty.

The chip also allows the user to see the manufactured projections of other users. Underground clubs flourish, allowing the chipped to bask in the superficial beauty of this augmented reality, swimming in a sea of sameness while fueling the delusion of perfection.

As with most revolutionary tech, there’s a catch.

The implant can only be activated for twelve hours at a time, allowing the mind and body time to recover from the taxing process. Of course, as we witnessed with grotesque consequences in The Substance, there will always be those who demand more, pushing technology beyond its intended limits to produce more lasting results.

In Reality+, a shady underground organization has begun offering a service that exploits the reality-altering chip, allowing users to be their false selves 24 hours a day.

As our hero, the lonely everyman Vincent (a stellar performance from Vincent Colombe, who was stone-cold terrifying in Fargeat’s gripping Revenge), contemplates the risky procedure, he must confront his willingness to lose his authentic self completely.

Is Vincent ready to live life full-time as Vincent+ (Aurélien Muller),  and what are the implications of this choice on his desperate pursuit of love and happiness?

The implications of this world—a world that seems all too imaginable, given our current trajectory—are chilling.

The film’s gorgeously realized world of future tech highlights the pervasive push for conformity over individualism, fueled by an insidious beauty industry and marketing designed to feed our insecurities.

Full of cinematic references ranging from Cronenberg to Verhoeven to a brilliant nod to The Matrix, viewers will also be rewarded with ample visual precursors to The Substance.

Reality+ unpacks a great deal in its short run time, exploring the ways in which technology can dramatically alter our perceptions of ourselves and others in profound ways.

It’s a film that feels hauntingly prescient.

Less nihilistic with a far more hopeful ending than The Substance, Reality+ is a mesmerizing and entertaining look at the toxic soullessness of manufactured beauty, the agony of self-loathing, and the core of what makes us human, flaws and all.