Critics reviews

I know of few directors better than Cronenberg who grasp the simultaneous allure and absurdity of coitus. Even with the potential for repercussion, the hunger can't be denied.

Cronenberg is at his finest here since Videodrome, coalescing the hypersexual, the grotesque, and the visceral.

Cronenberg matches this strange banality with a striking formal artifice: Rear projection is used conspicuously, no attempt is made to efface the rigidity of studio sets, and performances from reliably robust character actors seem stilted and plastic. It all adds up to something slightly unreal, which makes it, unexpectedly, one of the most memorable fantasy worlds ever realized.

Sex and violence, as well as film theorist Noël Carroll's musings on horrific exploitation of interstitial conceptual schemata, all figure heavily in Cronenberg's work. Indeed, for Cronenberg, sex and violence are inexorably linked. In addition, questions of un/reality and the limits of physicality are all raised when the film begins exploring bodily enhancement.

Salman Rushdie's predicament reportedly inspired Cronenberg's script, but eXistenZ has nothing whatsoever to say about the artist in exile, content instead to wallow in facile mind-fuck material about the nature of reality.

As a thrill-ride in its own right, eXistenZ is fine - it's slick, swift and droll. But as an anxious entertainment, which is meant to nag and gnaw at our hunger for surrendering ourselves to surrogate thrills, especially of the disreputable kind that last about two hours (for what, the film keeps nudging us, is eXistenZ if not a hyper-real story, and what is Allegra but a Künstler with the Gesamtkunstwerk to trump them all?), it's more than a touch half-baked.

Dark, delirious fun.