Reality+ (2014) Dir: Coralie Fargeat

This sci-fi short film; the directorial debut of Coralie Fargeat, has been on my watchlist a few months now, pretty much since watching Fargeat's magnificent Holyywood hit; 'The Substance'. I know that this isn't held in anything like the esteem that her feature films are, but, regardless, I was still looking forward to seeing it.

The film had a lot of the stylistic choices that would go on to define her massively successful sophomore feature film; 'The Substance', particularly the inclusion of some elements of body horror. This included a very similar piece of injury detail to one of the famous bits in 'The Substance'.

At just over twenty minutes, this was not a particularly long film, but Fargeat managed to fit a lot of story into it. Said-story was rather bitter-sweet in nature, and addressed many of the familiar themes featured in the aforementioned 'The Substance'. If anything, one could argue that this was the male equivalent of it, though far more streamlined.

Vincent Colombe leads a small cast, with what was a fairly average, though functional, performance. He was outdone by both women; Vanessa Hessler and Aurélia Poirier, who were both legitimately quite good, in my opinion. I'll also give a little credit to Aurélien Muller for what turned out to be a better performance than I thought it would be.

Overall, I thought this was a solid short film, but it definitely came across like an earlier directorial effort. I'm glad I watched it though, it was very cool to see the developing style of one of the breakput filmmakers of the last few years. I will certainly be watching Fargeat's festure film debut; 'Revenge', very soon.