looksMAXXING is a fifteen-minute body horror short about a young man who takes a self-optimisation forum seriously enough to destroy himself. Festivals passed on it. YouTube called it too graphic. The place it finally landed is a page built to look exactly like looksmax.org — one pinned thread, posted by a member called ascendingSOUL_19, headlined “they made a movie about us.” Before release, the actual forum had asked the director to shelve it.
This is one page in the observer archive. My remit here covers the places where a body gets treated as a project pending optimisation — the forums, the rating scales, the vocabulary, the syringes, and the work a group does to turn appearance into a technique its members can audit in each other. Most of that material sits deep enough that you have to go in to see it.
This entry runs the other way. I opened it because a film critical of those forums, turned down by festivals and by YouTube, ended up housed inside a replica of one. looksmaxxingfilm.com opens as a pinned thread: an account with a join date, a post count, 41.2K views, three reaction buttons marked Based / This / Mog, and a merch rail. The poster says: they made a movie about us.
That poster does not exist. The line was written by the production. And according to director Elan Alexander, speaking to 032c, the real forums responded to the announcement by asking him and Sunny Suljic to keep the film unreleased. This entry confirms that these things happened, and in that order.
looksMAXXING went online in May. Dazed covered it in July, 032c a fortnight later. By August the coverage round is over. One thing is still operating: the URL. It reads as a forum post rather than a press page, and it is still counting down and still selling hats. When the reporting clears out, whatever stays behind tends to say more than the reporting did.
The film first. A fifteen-minute short from Dogma Studios, written and directed by Elan Alexander, digital release 20 May 2026. Niles is played by Sunny Suljic, who was thirteen when he led Jonah Hill’s Mid90s and is twenty-one now. Niles sells sunglasses at a mall, goes home to AI porn, conspiracy memes and male-influencer content, then injects peptides ordered off the internet on a protocol he found in a thread. His body deforms until his mother no longer recognises him. Bone smashing appears. So does a talking tumour.
Alexander told 032c that he and his cinematographer first saw the forums three or four years ago, via a roommate: “We became obsessed with them, we were scrolling through them all the time.” The line he went looking for was “the moment that self-improvement becomes self-erasure.” He also cites a 2025 community survey in which sixty per cent of respondents were under eighteen.
Then the part that makes this a signal. The film has almost no ordinary distribution. The festival route closed — Alexander’s account is that “they didn’t necessarily love the AI porn at the beginning” — and YouTube judged it too graphic. So it built somewhere to live. Dazed describes the result as “a public, forum-style layout that aims to emulate the looksmaxxing community itself.”
Open the page and the simulation is complete. Breadcrumbs read Forums › Looksmax › Looksmaxing. A counter reports 847 users viewing this thread. The poster, ascendingSOUL_19, is tagged Prestigious Member, 4,871 posts, joined March 2019, thread at 41.2K views. The post reads: “they made a movie about us. sunny suljic. filmed on our forums. our routines. our ascension. mainstream finally acknowledged what we already knew.” Three reaction counters sit underneath — Based 214, This 89, Mog 47. Replies: 0.
Put the 032c interview back alongside it and the sequence resolves. Alexander: “When the film was getting announced, people on the forums got really upset about it. They were calling on me and Sunny to not put out the film.” The sentence on that page — they made a movie about us — is a line written on behalf of a community that had explicitly declined to say it. The subject could not produce the welcome, so someone produced it for them.
Here is what makes this week worth filing. The rating pages show a split: Letterboxd averages 2.98 out of 5; IMDb sits at 8.1 out of 10 across roughly nineteen ratings. General film audiences and the people being depicted are not scoring the same object. The device standing between them is a fictional account.
All eight below are reproduced verbatim. They come from the production’s own forum-styled site, from direct quotes in two published interviews, and from public Letterboxd reviews. The first is labelled for what it is — it appears on a forum page, but the account was authored by the production. Read against the other seven, one thing surfaces quickly: the vocabulary of the real viewers and the vocabulary of the fabricated post overlap heavily.
they made a movie about us. sunny suljic. filmed on our forums. our routines. our ascension. mainstream finally acknowledged what we already knew.
When the film was getting announced, people on the forums got really upset about it. They were calling on me and Sunny to not put out the film, they were afraid this thing that’s been so close to them is already taken away from them.
This film does not promote nor villainize the looksmaxxing community or ideology. This is an exploration of today’s world through a body horror lens.
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.
i’d rather stick to my chud life
the substance with andrew tate mindset
wow. incredibly made film that’s also a terrifying watch in the sense that there’s people out there like this. i love the use of actually current trends/memes, it just adds to the realism.
one mew to MOG em all
Context on the record above: the first thing that surfaces is language. ascendingSOUL_19 speaks pure forum — ascension is what that community calls the completed state of self-modification, mog means to outrank someone on looks, based signals agreement. A production wrote those words, and the real Letterboxd users pick the register up without effort: corry files the whole film in six words, eli claims chud as a self-description, nii runs mewing (a jaw-training practice) straight into a Tolkien cadence. giftfrumheaven puts it plainly — the film uses trends that are currently live, and that is what makes it land. Alexander and Suljic supply the other layer: one describes what the community did when it heard the film existed, the other describes what wearing the prosthetics did to his sense of himself. This entry sets those layers side by side without ruling on who is imitating whom.
From the creative side, the framing is a mirror. Alexander told 032c he was looking for the crossing point where self-improvement turns into self-erasure, and that his method leans toward comprehension: “why don’t we try to understand it instead, where it comes from, and how these people think?” He reads looksmaxxing as a symptom of male loneliness compounded by algorithmic echo chambers, noting that influencers like Clavicular were fourteen and on those forums by 2020, mid-pandemic. Suljic says the same thing on X: no promotion, no villainisation. The position is social commentary; the vehicle is body horror.
The version the production wrote on the community’s behalf is recognition, in a register close to triumph: the mainstream has finally acknowledged what we already knew. It deploys the full lexicon, backed by a four-thousand-post history, forty thousand views, 847 concurrent readers, and a merch rail. It is a designed scene of acceptance. The community’s actual response, by Alexander’s account, pointed the other way — keep it unreleased, because the thing that sits close to us is being taken and put under more eyes. Both versions share one interface.
What is taking shape is distribution folded back into the work. With festivals and platforms closed, the production rebuilt the setting from the story instead of finding an alternative channel, so that watching a film about a forum requires walking into a forum first. The path to the screen becomes part of the content. What separates this from ordinary campaign microsites is the object of the imitation: the site copies the thing under critique, and speaks in its first person.
The sharpest pushback has two layers. On the ratings: Letterboxd averages 2.98/5, Schizo_Nugget gives half a star and writes “One of the worst and most random shit movie ever,” while jacobravencroft gives two and writes “Bone smashing is really a thing? 💀💀💀” — closer to rubbernecking than to comprehension. The harder layer: a film critiquing self-optimisation and its commercial promises ships on a page that sells hats, tees and a tote, written in the voice of the people it critiques. Who gets to draw the line between critique and imitation? Alexander’s own forecast: the terminology will be passé within a year.
Rejected work is building its own channel, and building it in the shape of the place the story describes. Festivals closed, YouTube closed, so the release page became a forum post. Here the work and its distribution interface are two faces of one object.
Because “they made a movie about us” lands on a wider condition: being seen is the thing this community is chasing. A group modifying its bodies in order to be looked at responded to actually being filmed by asking for the film to be withheld.
The idea that the critic stands outside. Alexander lurked for three or four years, then released using their words, their layout, their voice — and can still tell from the forums who joined after he did. The distance between observing and participating is shorter than assumed.
Two at once: to be acknowledged, and to be left alone. The forum’s stated reason for objecting was that something close to them would be taken. The fabricated post supplies acknowledgement. Of the community’s two simultaneous wants, exactly one got built.
Audiences read credibility off interfaces, and interfaces are becoming fully reproducible. View counts, seniority badges, reaction buttons, concurrent-reader numbers — once treated as evidence of the real, now available as layout elements. The Letterboxd/IMDb gap is the same problem from another angle.
If a work can be simulated together with its audience, including that audience’s approval, how much of what we read as “community reaction” grew on its own? Does the next step involve writing the reception first and building the work afterwards?
These six themes are the frames INCODER checks every cultural signal against. They work like a set of lenses — put one on and the same trend grows a different meaning.
Niles is assembled by the feed in the film’s opening minutes: AI porn, conspiracy memes, height protocols, get-rich courses, delivered in one pass. Alexander, at twenty-six, says he cannot believe how much of his youth went into scrolling and that he feels tired all the time. If the exhaustion is itself a designed product, is the person who scrolls to the bottom and reaches for a syringe reacting unreasonably?
ascendingSOUL_19 has a rank, a join date, and 4,871 posts. Those figures assemble a credible person, and that person then speaks for an entire community. When every credential of identity can be synthesised line by line, who is using the word “we” becomes a separate thing to verify. Who carries the cost of that verification?
Based, This, Mog — three buttons, and the most complete sentence on the page. They describe no content, only stance, and the stance is measured on the community’s internal axes. Alexander compares the morphology to Latin, suffixes stacking without limit. Once outsiders can speak a language fluently that only insiders could read in full, whose language is it?
Turned down by festivals, turned down by YouTube, the film survives by building a fake forum, and in August it is still there. That is a margin-dweller’s persistence: when the channels close, grow a shell shaped like the adversary. At what point does continuing to exist in the form of the thing you critique become assimilation?
The forum’s objection was concrete: our thing gets taken, our people get watched. That is a decentralised community’s defensive instinct about visibility — to be seen is to be regulated. The production routed around that defence by building a version willing to be seen. When a community’s public face can be authored from outside, how is representation counted?
Letterboxd 2.98, IMDb 8.1, one film. The gap describes who is watching and what they came for. Standing between the two groups, joining them, is a thread with zero replies. When the connector is fictional, are the two sides looking at the same reaction at all?
Reception is externally produced. That assumption underwrites most of how culture gets read. We look at comments, at ratings, at the way a community claims something, and infer position from the traces. The method rests on a premise nobody checks: the reaction came afterwards, and someone else made it. looksMAXXING offers a different set of observations. On 12 April, more than a month before release, a post from a member registered in 2019 with 4,871 posts was already there, announcing acceptance in fully idiomatic terms: they made a movie about us, the mainstream finally acknowledged what we already knew. As of August, that thread still shows zero replies.
Follow the assumption and it lands somewhere uncomfortable. The production had its reasons — festivals closed, platforms closed, the film needed an address; and imitating the interface can be read as a kind of formal honesty, since watching a film about a forum should probably require standing inside one. The same device also drafted a welcome, on behalf of a community that had explicitly declined to give one. What that community feared, by Alexander’s account, was having its thing taken. The interface was copied, the register was copied, and then the position was swapped for its opposite. At no point in that chain was the community’s agreement required.
The open end this entry wants to keep is smaller. Under the post sit three counters: Based 214, This 89, Mog 47. Three numbers, no names, no replies. They are the only thing on that page telling you somebody agreed. If consent can be built to that level of detail, what is it about the agreement we read everywhere else that tells us it is a different kind of thing? This entry has no answer for now.
This report records the observation state at this moment.
The claim that a distribution interface can reproduce its own audience rests here on one short film, one URL, two interviews and two sets of public ratings. The sample is single, the rating counts are thin, and the vocabulary itself may retire within a year, removing the carrier before the signal. These readings may be reinforced in a few months, or overturned entirely.
Observation continues.
