This article is about the 2014 French film. For the 2022 philosophy book, see Reality+ (book).
Reality+ is a 2014 French science fictionshort film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. It explores a version of Paris in the near future in which a brain implant called Reality+ allows users to see themselves with their ideal physique.
Based on themes including society's obsession with appearance, Reality+ was funded through the Audi Talents Awards. Fargeat used the limited budget to blend futuristic elements with the historic setting of Paris. The film received accolades and served as inspiration for Fargeat's critically acclaimed film The Substance (2024).
Synopsis
In Paris at some point during the near future, Vincent is unhappy with his appearance and installs Reality+, a brain implant that lets users see themselves and others with their dream physique. Those with Reality+ see themselves as models, while those without must settle for a less ideal reality. However, Reality+ only works in 12-hour intervals, which poses a challenge for Vincent as he navigates an appearance-obsessed world and falls for fellow Reality+ user Stella.
The film was written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, produced by Jérôme Lateur, and shot in France. Fargeat was one of the recipients of the 2013 Audi Talents Awards, a cultural sponsorship program that funded the film. Her concept for the film stemmed from media stories she had seen about people willing to suffer and risk their lives for the unattainable promise of happiness, such as Russian girls undergoing hundreds of operations to resemble a Barbie doll or Chinese girls enduring painful and dangerous leg-lengthening surgery. A fan of science fiction, she drew inspiration from the works of Philip K. Dick and the films Total Recall (1990), Gattaca (1997), and Existenz (1999). She felt that science fiction was rarely explored in French cinema, which Audi Talents juror Nicolas Altmayer ascribed to a lack of resources.
When casting the "plus" version of each character, Fargeat sought actors with an "unnervingly similar and unnaturally perfect" appearance, aiming to make them feel distinctly detached from reality. For the true-to-life characters, she sought the opposite and thus looked for actors with imperfections to create empathy and charm. Italian-American actress Vanessa Hessler was working in New York City when she met Fargeat over Skype. She liked the script and the film's message that "appearance isn't everything in life".
Fargeat felt it was crucial to establish the film's worldbuilding to ensure its credibility, believing that the entire film would fall apart if the worldbuilding failed. Working with a limited budget, she could not showcase elements like futuristic cars, but conveyed the setting in other ways. She depicted a futuristic city growing within the historic version of Paris and added technological interfaces, fingerprint scans for payments, and other elements that might become commonplace within the next two decades. She aimed to present Vincent's apartment as a claustrophobic space, drawing inspiration from the work of Erwin Olaf and Gregory Crewdson. She also used dark colors and sound design to enhance this idea.
The film features over 90 visual effects shots. The nightclub scene featured 50 extras, with multiple takes combined to create the illusion of between 300 and 400 people in the club. For the scenes where Reality+ is activated in front of the mirror, actors were filmed in front of a green screen, with the background recreated in 3D based on a photographed real bathroom. Camera movements were tracked with the actors' reflections via match moving to ensure a perfect match. Cinematographer Philippe Lozano used a head-mounted camera to capture the moment when the chip begins to malfunction.
Fargeat expressed interest in adapting Reality+ into an episode of the British dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror (2011–present). The film was later licensed to Wired, and would go on to inspire Fargeat's critically acclaimed film The Substance (2024).
