eXistenZ

Part of The Loft Cinema’s summer series, 1999! BEST. MOVIE. YEAR. EVER.

David Cronenberg entered a new dimension when he unleashed his wild virtual reality sci-fi film eXistenZ in 1999 – a year when end-of-the-millennium cinema was seemingly obsessed with the topic thanks to The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor. Playing off themes of body horror, corrosive technology and the ever-thinning line between reality and hallucination that he had explored in earlier films like Videodrome, with eXistenZ, the director applied his distinctly dystopian, distinctly grotesque outlook to the soon-to-be-ubiquitous notion of humans willingly subordinating themselves to machines. When leading game designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is attacked by an assassin while conducting a focus group for her new VR game eXistenZ, she escapes into the game with marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law), kicking off a nightmarish adventure involving such Cronenberg genre hallmarks as sketchy protagonists, body festishization and mutation, gross organic matter, wild conspiracies, and the film’s infamous “guns made out of bones” (that also shoot human teeth instead of bullets). Cronenberg is at his thought-provoking, squirm-inducing best here, with great supporting terms from Sarah Polley, Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe as a character named “Gas.” Time to plug in! (Dir. by David Cronenberg, 1999, Canada/UK/France, 97 mins, Rated R)