Reality+ (2014) on Netflix
Vincent, unhappy with his looks, installs Reality+, a chip that shows users themselves and others with their dream physique. He falls for Stella, another user, but the chip works only 12 hours.
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- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.0/104,505 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Plot summary
In Paris in the near future, Vincent is uncomfortable with his appearance and has himself fitted with a brain implant called Reality+. The chip changes what wearers perceive: each user looks to himself, and to every other user, like the ideal body he has always wanted, while people without it see the ordinary version. The effect does not last around the clock; it works in twelve-hour stretches, leaving Vincent to see himself as he really is for the rest of each day. In a city preoccupied with appearance, he meets Stella, another user of the chip, and falls for her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Reality+ (2014)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Coralie Fargeat's concept for Reality+ came from media stories of people risking their lives for the unattainable promise of happiness, such as Russian girls undergoing hundreds of operations to resemble a Barbie doll and Chinese girls having painful, dangerous leg-lengthening surgery.
- Reality+ contains over 90 visual effects shots, and its nightclub scene used only 50 extras; multiple takes were combined to create the illusion of between 300 and 400 people in the club.
- The short was later licensed to Wired, and it went on to inspire writer-director Coralie Fargeat's critically acclaimed film The Substance, released in 2024.
- For the scenes where Reality+ is activated in front of a mirror, the actors were filmed against a green screen and the background was rebuilt in 3D from a photograph of a real bathroom; match moving kept the camera movements locked to the actors' reflections.
- Coralie Fargeat could not show futuristic cars on Reality+'s limited budget, so she showed a futuristic city growing inside the historic version of Paris, adding fingerprint scans for payments and other elements that might become commonplace within two decades.
