‘Tell me the truth… are we still in the game?’
Full disclosure. I added this film to my ever expanding watchlist because it was referenced in Rick & Morty, a reference that I subsequently didn’t understand. Instead, I laughed nervously and looked around the room like a lost puppy to make sure nobody was watching. To ensure this never happened again, I delved into the bizarre world of eXistenZ, and boy is this film weird.
Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a world class game designer who is forced to play through her latest creation to escape from a collection of assassins from the criminal underworld. Joining Geller is unassuming marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law). The two make for an unlikely, if effective, partnership.
David Cronenberg makes weird, sexually charged, genre hopping indie movies, but often tries to disguise them as Hollywood fare. eXistenZ has a hollywood cast but is very much on the outer fringes of what one would call the mainstream. Think David Lynch but with more monsters. The cast do a good job in tying together what is an increasingly labyrinthine plot, and Cronenberg’s venture into the world of gaming feels both horribly dated and massively before its time, a dichotomy that makes about as much sense as eXistenZ itself.
This film has mostly been forgotten about now, Rick & Morty aside, but it stands as a time capsule for a generation that were still terrified about the Y2K bug and suffering mild anxiety at the possibility their Furby might come to life and attempt to eat them. It is unfortunate that The Matrix was released a mere month before eXistenZ, but with the benefit of distance, sci-fi fans can surely enjoy both. I know I did.