eXistenZ (1999) Review

Official trailer

The bio-ports, the organic game consoles connecting directly to the spine, the game-meat assembled from mutant amphibians: every design choice in eXistenZ makes the body the site of horror and the technology plugged into it the vector of corruption. Cronenberg’s consistent argument is that technology and biology aren’t separate categories, and that their merger is disturbing in direct proportion to how intimate it becomes.

My rating: 7 out of 10. A good Cronenberg film instead of a great one, below Videodrome in formal ambition and below The Fly in emotional impact. But it’s doing something specific, doing it consistently, and the bio-organic design work alone justifies the rating.

I have a great time with this film, and it makes me squirm exactly where Cronenberg wants me to. The ideas are sharp, the design is disgusting in the best way, and the ending is right. I just never feel endangered by it the way Videodrome endangers me, and that gap is where the missing three points went.

The Body Horror Foundation

Cronenberg has spent his career exploring what happens when technology becomes too intimate with human biology. Videodrome grew a VHS slot in Max’s stomach. The Fly dissolved Seth Brundle’s body into something combining human and insect. eXistenZ creates game consoles that are grown from biological material, connect directly to the spine through bio-ports, and interface with the nervous system in ways that make the boundary between game experience and real experience permeable to the point of dissolution.

The bio-ports are the film’s most concentrated image.

The installation of a bio-port in the lower back, the sensation described in terms that are both technical and physical, the wrongness that comes from having something biological inserted into your body that your body didn’t grow, communicates Cronenberg’s argument more efficiently than any dialogue could. Technology this intimate isn’t neutral. It changes the body it enters and the consciousness it connects to. The game and the player aren’t separable after the connection is made.

The game-meat hardware, organic game consoles grown from mutant animal parts, warm to the touch, requiring care and maintenance like a living thing, extends the logic further. Cronenberg is interested in what technology looks like when it’s made of the same stuff as the bodies it’s designed to serve. The organic console is my favorite piece of design in the film. It’s warm, it needs looking after, and I find it far more disturbing than any chrome gadget, because part of me wants to pet it.

The Nested Reality Structure

The film’s narrative structure, a series of nested game levels where each apparent return to reality may represent a deeper layer of virtual experience, is handled with more discipline than most films of this type manage. Cronenberg doesn’t tell you when you’ve left the game because the characters don’t know either. The disorientation is the point.

What makes the structure coherent instead of arbitrary is the consistency of the tell. Each layer of the game has a slightly-off quality, characters behaving as if following scripts they didn’t write, situations resolving too conveniently, the quality of a world designed instead of grown. That consistent quality distinguishes game-world from real-world in ways the characters can sense but can’t verify, the correct amount of ambiguity for a film whose argument is about the loss of that distinction.

The final scene, the reveal that what we took to be reality was also a game level, followed by the question “are we still in the game?”, is exactly how I want this film to end. Cronenberg justifies the ambiguity because he built a structure that makes the question unanswerable instead of merely unanswered. It’s the moment the film clicks into place for me.

Versus Videodrome

Videodrome is the better film, more formally ambitious, more emotionally disturbing, more willing to follow its own logic into places that real horror requires. eXistenZ is the more accessible film, operating with conventional thriller mechanics alongside the body horror and nested reality elements in ways that make it easier to follow without fully sacrificing what makes Cronenberg’s approach distinctive.

The accessibility is both the film’s strength and its limitation, and it’s where my enthusiasm cools. eXistenZ reaches an audience Videodrome doesn’t, and that counts for something.

The price is the formal radicalism that makes Videodrome feel dangerous. This film lets me keep my analytical distance, and I kept wishing Cronenberg would take it away from me. Videodrome refuses that distance, and it’s worse to experience and better as a film for it.

Is eXistenZ worth watching?

eXistenZ gets its 7 and not a point more.

The body horror design is original, the nested structure is handled with discipline, and the ending is right. What holds it down is that it never frightens me, and a Cronenberg film that doesn’t frighten me feels like a chance he left on the table. Still, it’s doing something specific to itself instead of being a lesser Videodrome, and that’s enough for me to recommend it.

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