In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our team favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
If you spent a large portion of your teenage years trawling the ‘Arthouse’ shelves of your local video store, then chances are David Cronenberg has had a significant impact on your appreciation of stomach-churning mutations and sudden, graphic violence in film. In eXistenZ, as writer, producer and director, he really gets to flex his oddball muscles.
Ostensibly a film about reality, virtual reality and gaming, eXistenZ was a part of the millennial neo-noir canon delving into the question of ‘how do we know what is real?’ alongside the likes of The Matrix and Dark City. For a generation of stoned and impressionable teenage boys and girls, it was some heavy shit.
In eXistenZ, Cronenberg really gets to indulge his fascination with sci-fi, ‘body-horror’ and the organic as technological, with some truly creepy models that will turn you off eating fish for as long as they’re seared into your brain.
Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is the world’s greatest designer of fully interactive ‘organic’ virtual reality games. While previewing her latest creation eXistenZ to an enraptured focus group, she’s attacked by a member of the radical Realist resistance, who are opposed to the virtual reality escapism marketed by the monolithic, über-powerful games companies. Geller and marketing trainee Ted Pikul (Jude Law as a convincing ingénue) go on the run with Geller’s damaged and dying game, and Geller convinces gaming virgin Pikul that the only way to save the game from being virally corrupted is to play it. But which level of existence is the game, and which is actual reality?
There are guns made out of fish bones that fire human teeth, game controllers that plug into your spine and look like mutated foetal feet, enough gaming references to keep even the most ardent geek happy, and numerous self-aware nods to plot and character development, plus screen time for some of Canadian indie cinema’s finest like Don McKellar, Ian Holm and Callum Keith Rennie.
Perhaps the greatest praise for eXistenZ, though, is that thirteen years later it still stands up - the rise of virtual reality technology and the huge growth of gaming as entertainment and lifestyle means that the warped world that Cronenberg created has even more satirical punch in 2012 than it did in 1999.
- Nick Jarvis
“The Matrix is mainstream sci-fi, but eXistenZ, written by Cronenberg, is much stranger; it creates a world where organic and inorganic are not separate states, but kind of chummy.” Roger Ebert – Chicago Sun-Times
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.