Jennifer Jason Leigh, in one of her best performances, portrays video game developer Allegra Geller in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. She plays Allegra Geller, a game designer who is known everywhere and is a living legend to her followers, all hooked on her virtual reality games. For years, she has been working on a new game and gaming system, one set to change all the rules. This puts her in jeopardy, because the other gaming manufacturing companies are literally at war with each other.

The surprisingly underrated film has the theme of revolution and civil war running through it which, combined with its vision of virtual reality, advancing technologies, and the clash of political ideologies, makes eXistenZ one of the most disturbingly prescient films of Cronenberg’s career.

Cronenberg Makes a Video Game in eXistenZ

As the film begins, there is a research and development test for a bunch of lucky winners who get to be the first to try the new eXistenZ system. But there are immediate problems. Someone smuggles in an organic gun past the metal detectors, a weapon that resembles a strange sea creature and that uses human teeth as bullets. An assassination attempt is made on Allegra by individuals in the Realist movement, who believe her game is demonic and dangerous to actual reality. Ted (a great Jude Law), a security guard, takes off in a car with Allegra as they go into hiding, fleeing their would-be assassins. No one can be trusted.

She has created a new gaming system known as eXistenZ, a virtual reality game in which the player has a bio-port attached to her or his back through a hole drilled into the spine, and a pod device that hooks directly into that hole. The human being essentially serves as a long USB port, and the fleshy monstrous-looking game system can access the user’s memories, desires, wants and fears; it’s a merging of man and machine. Except these devices are not made up of entirely synthetic components. What makes these game portals different (and controversial) is that they are living, breathing things.

They are made by breeding certain types of mutated fish-reptile-hybrids that grow up and become living breathing devices capable of being harmed and killed, and saved by surgical intervention. They can get sick, and in one scene when a portal is broken, two doctors perform a gruesome act of surgery on it, saving the organic gaming device. Ted, while on the run with Allegra (who treats her bioport as if it were her baby), gets such a hole put in his back, experiencing Cronenberg’s vision of virtual reality for the first time, and he can’t tell the difference.

Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh Get Virtual in eXistenZ

The devices, the act of inserting a fleshy pod into someone’s back, and the whole concept of eXistenZ is quintessential Cronenberg, reminiscent of his films like Videodrome, where the organic and the inorganic can unite and be one. Like Videodrome and his new movie Crimes of the Future, eXistenZ features a world of competing politics and philosophies who war against each other over technology, ideologies, art and entertainment. Allegra survives another attack, and it is clear that there are powerful interests, either aligned with the Realist movement or from competing corporations, out to destroy her and her game.

Related: David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future Is Too Grotesque For The Cannes Audience

When Ted first connects to a bioport, it opens whole new worlds for him. This in turn makes it impossible to tell which is the real world and which is the simulated artificial world. It’s like when Neo of The Matrix takes the pill that wakes him up from the false reality he had previously been living. This is a highly dangerous concept, because we can then never really know if this world is the real world or if we are just characters in someone else’s game.

Allegra’s Realist enemies denounce her virtual reality devices mainly for this reason, which explains why there are spies everywhere, spies willing to kill and die for a cause they are dedicated to. Like the thin line between virtual and actual reality, it’s nearly impossible to tell who’s on your side and who isn’t.

Philip K. Dick Meets Body Horror

In addition to being a typical Crronenberg “body horror” film,” this is also a Philip K. Dick type film where reality itself is questioned. While Cronenberg wrote the script himself and it’s not based on anything, like Philip K. Dick’s work, eXistenZ presents a world where you cannot trust what you are seeing and experiencing. It’s like in the philosophical allegory of Plato’s Cave, where a man in a cave is only able to perceive shadows, and thus thinks that shadows are all that exist. This is the dilemma of the game players in the film: assuming that their world is real and more than an illusion, rather than just shadows made from a reality we are unable to access.

In one telling scene, Ted assassinates the manager of a Chinese restaurant. The gun he uses is made up of bits of the grotesque fish he is eating, and he shoots the man twice in the face, killing him. Since Ted frequently expresses confusion as to when he is in the virtual reality world and when he is in the real world, he may have committed a real-life murder.

Virtual Reality is the ultimate disconnect from reality, an active dissociation. Plug in and the world you knew is gone, now populated by virtual characters who are not real. One can end up spending large sums of time in keeping up this façade, in living in the non-reality where we and our lives are different and more meaningful and important. This virtual world and the derealization of the senses leads to a lack of the most basic need to communicate and be intimate.

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In this way, this is the closest that director David Cronenberg has come to adapting a Philip K. Dick book, where the rules of consciousness and time are put on hold. Only very few filmmakers have been able to turn one of his book into a great film, as they deal with so many philosophical ideas and political ideologies where there is a rejection of reality and the concept of self. Cronenberg had previously made two films based on books that seemed unadaptable — William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and J.G. Ballard’s Crash. Both films are excellent and prove that Cronenberg has some type of magical power that allows him to film the unfilmable.

The Disease of Ideology and Entertainment in eXistenZ

Disease is another idea discussed in eXistenZ (and Crimes of the Future). Some players of Allegra’s virtual reality game can inadvertently give the game a disease inadvertently, as it runs off human power; a game pod can become infected, even by ideology. Conversely, the film asks if entertainment can be a vessel of dangerous ideology, not just video games and virtual reality, but films and literature as well, not to mention technology.


David Cronenberg’s film is a work of grotesque genius. Some of the animals, gaming devices, and sea creatures that we see are disgusting and brilliantly constructed with some of the director’s grossest special effects. The way he films the virtual world of the game is brilliant, creating an uncanny valley where everything’s just slightly off. This 1999 film would be Cronenberg’s last true ‘body horror’ movie for 23 years (until Crimes of the Future), and finds him at the perfect nexus between the bloody horror of his earlier films and the more psychological dramas like Spider, Eastern Promises, and A History of Violence.

eXistenZ, however, is Cronenberg at his truest and his best, delving deep into his unseemly vision at top form. Welcome to the Flesh Revolution.