It’s tempting to frame Looksmaxxing (2026) as the male answer to 2024’s feminist body horror The Substance. Following a “dopamine-depleted young man” named Niles, played by actor and skateboarder Sunny Suljic, the short film follows his spiralling obsession with hyper-masculine beauty standards, via toxic influencers, a DIY drug protocol sourced from the shady fringes of the web, a talking tumour, and bone smashing. By now, US-based writer and director Elan Alexander is used to the comparison. But, as he points out, the script predated Coralie Fargeat’s hit film by some time. In fact, Looksmaxxing emerged out of his obsession with looksmaxxing forums way back in 2022.

Maybe both filmmakers were just responding to something unavoidable in our culture: a dangerous, all-consuming addiction to extreme beauty hacks at both ends of the spectrum. “I will give Coralie her flowers, especially for making a film that helped revamp the body horror genre,” Alexander says. In terms of influences, though, he’s more likely to cite David Cronenberg films like Videodrome and The Fly, or Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. There’s also a dash of American Psycho and Beau Is Afraid – both films with an unreliable, and perhaps delusional, protagonist. Similarly, Niles’s ‘ascent’ to sigma male status is filled with gaps and uncertainties. In short, Alexander says: “This kid has lost his mind.”

How did Niles lose his mind, though? The tale essentially takes the form of a hyper-modern tragedy: in the darkness of his bedroom Niles goons to AI porn and is inundated with common male influencer content, from conspiracy memes, to tips on “pulling foids”, “increasing net worth” and “becoming the big kahuna”. Meanwhile, in the real world – a nondescript mall where Niles sells sunglasses to what his idols might call the chads and stacys – he feels invisible and undesirable. 

From the moment Alexander discovered the hidden looksmaxxing communities that thrive under the surface of the mainstream internet, he suspected that a crisis was unfolding at the intersection of these real and virtual worlds. “We were witnessing young men who felt lost and very insecure... this was another symptom of the male loneliness epidemic.” Add to that the algorithmically-powered mechanisms of the modern internet – which thrive on our deepest fears and desires, and tend to push them to their extremes – and the monstrous outcome of Niles’s self-optimisation feels almost inevitable.

The young looksmaxxer is played with an uncanny intensity by Suljic, wearing increasingly exaggerated muscle suits and prosthetics. By the end of the film, his muscles almost seem ready to burst through his skin, and his mother (the film’s emotional centre) is horrified by what her son has become. “The bodysuit was extremely difficult to get used to,” the actor tells Dazed, adding that it took anywhere between four and six hours to apply the SFX that completed his transformation. When he had it on, though, he says: “I was a whole different person. I almost had a distorted sense of reality, like... this is not me at all. I kind of lost myself in it.”

Suljic, whose first lead role – in Jonah Hill’s Mid90s – came at the age of 13, is now 21. This made him perfectly primed to understand the landscape of Looksmaxxing, suggests Alexander, who’s five years older. “Obviously, he’s not an incel,” the filmmaker clarifies. “But he brought this real truth to it. Niles was more of a caricature in my head, initially, and Sunny made him a three-dimensional person.” After all, the actor reminds us, there’s a vulnerable human underneath all the gore and “bulbous, tumorous” prosthetics.

“Clavicular was raised on these forums. I think he was 14 when he first got on there in 2020, during a global pandemic. For these guys, it felt like they were being given the secrets to life” – Elan Alexander

“The film does critique looksmaxxing, 100 per cent,” Alexander says. “But it’s not like we’re pointing the finger and laughing, as cold and dissociated as the film is. Nothing gets solved that way. Instead, it’s like, why don’t we try to understand it instead, where it comes from, and how these people think?” In other words, Looksmaxxing is less interested in demanding accountability from influencers like Clavicular – whose rise was witnessed in real-time by the team behind the film– and more interested in asking how these characters were formed by the online communities they frequented.

“Clavicular was raised on these forums,” he adds. “I think he was 14 when he first got on there in 2020, during a global pandemic.” And, like many young people at the time, he was searching for answers in a world that felt increasingly hostile. “For these guys, it felt like they were being given the secrets to life. Obviously, everyone wants to feel like they’re good looking. These things are innate to every single person, and tap into insecurities that we all have.”

Suljic agrees that the problem, while focused on people’s outward appearance, runs much more than just skin-deep. “Everyone wants to do the easy shit,” he says. “‘Eat these peptides from China and you’re going to be 6’4, buy a course and you’re going to have Lamborghinis and private jets and a bunch of girls around you, you’re going to be the fucking Rock. It’s selling a false reality.”

If looksmaxxing exploits the internet’s desire for quick fixes and extreme, polarised content, the film pushes things in the opposite direction: it’s bleak, negative, and repulsive – difficult to watch, at times. And this is what horror does best, Alexander suggests: “You show people the darkest parts of the human mind, or reflect back a part of society so that it really sticks with people.” 

Looksmaxxing in particular seems to have struck a chord. So what’s next? Well, dreams of a film festival run were quickly shut down. “They didn’t necessarily love the AI porn at the beginning,” Alexander says. But something bigger is definitely in the works, he teases: “I can’t wait for Sunny to embody Niles on a larger scale.” For the time being, the short film is also available to watch on its own dedicated website, with a public, forum-style layout that aims to emulate the looksmaxxing community itself (this should, admittedly, come with its own content warning). Besides, the film proved “too graphic” for YouTube.

You can watch Looksmaxxing here.