We begin at a small seminar of gamers, brought to an abandoned church to test out the new system/game made by wunderkind designer Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh). This virtual reality role-player, the titular "eXistenZ," is accessed via hooking your game pod (blob) into your bio-port (spine hole). All of the players, about a dozen on stage including Allegra, go into a sleep-trance when they enter the world. Before they do, Allegra, seeming pensive, delivers a little speech about it...
Jude Law plays security guard / publicist Ted Pikul, which — that is a "/" for the ages in terms of job description (would make even Kordell Stewart shudder; hello sports dans!). Anyway, he searches/scans a latecomer to the event for potential weapons...
So they all hook into those weird-ass, formless globs and they start the group video-game party! Only they're immediately interrupted when said latecomer — a member of an anti-VR domestic terror outfit called The Realists — pulls a strange, organic gun out of his old game pod and opens fire on Allegra, hitting her in the shoulder. He screams "Death to the demoness, Allegra Geller. Death to Antennae Research!" as he does this, and these (both the design of the gun, and that "Death to!" line) are the first of many direct (and indirect) nods to 1983's Videodrome (watch and learn)...
Videodrome is my favorite Cronenberg movie (to date) and I think it's also his best. It's clever and loose and constantly exciting. So any allusions, however tangible, are always welcome in my book.
Pikul escapes with Allegara and fields a call from the brass at the company they both work for, the aforementioned Antennae Research, on his cool pink phone...
But Allegra throws it out the window so they can't be tracked. By anyone. They pull over so Pikul can remove the bullet from Allegra's shoulder and OH MY GOD IT IS NOT A BULLET, IT IS A HUMAN TOOTH ?!?!? ...
Allegra is worried that her bio-port was damaged during the shooting, thus comprising the life of the game. She needs to hook into the system to check it out but she can't go into the virtual reality alone; she needs to play the game alongside "somebody friendly." And that friend is gonna be Pikul. Only Pikul is not a gamer and doesn't have a bio-port installed on his spine because he — very reasonably so, imo — has a phobia about it. But in this strange world you can get a rogue bio-port installed in the middle of the night. You just have to find a backwoods gas station manned by an attendant/black market bio-port installer played by Willem Dafoe. His character's name is Gas and he is a BIG fan of Allegra Geller and he agrees to install a bio-port on Pikul...
Meanwhile, outside the station, Allegra encounters a cute little two-headed dragon lizard thing...
I mean look at this cute fucking guy...
The wonder around every corner. This is the movies, folks.
Back inside, Pikul is having second thoughts about finishing the port installation but Allegra talks him into it...
He's briefly paralyzed from the procedure, but Allegra is wasting no time. She wants to play the damn game...
There's something obviously very sexual about all this, sticking phallic tubes into hole and whatnot (duh). She uses WD-40 there, but later they will just use their mouths to wet the ends of the Umbys for insertion. In this case, it's all for not, as when they hook up Allegra's pod to Pikul, it's immediately fried. It turns out Gas installed a faulty bio-port and he was trying to ruin the game. He's a member of The Realists and, in the first of what will be countless double-crosses and acts of sabotage, he pulls a gun on Allegra, who has a 5-million dollar reward on her head...
RIP Gas, we hardly knew ya.
They drive off to an abounded ski lodge to find Ian Holm, a friend of Allegra's named Kiri Vinokur. Outside, they find another of those two-headed creatures and Pikul gets a quick lesson in exactly what he's looking at ("a sign of the times")...
In retrospect, this seems like an important moment. Are we really to believe that Pikul is so naive to the world he's living in that he didn't know animals like this existed? Hmmm...
Inside, Kiri is performing 'surgery' on Allegra's broken pod. If you don't count Law's strained American vocal stylings, this is the first of many painfully bad accents that — as we'll find it out in the end — are performed purposefully. We get some nice expo about what these fucking things actually are...
Kiri also replaces Pikul's bio-port and Allegra gives it a lil love poke before sucking off an Umby and sticking it in (I'm sorry this is just what happens)...
And it is here, at the 40-minute mark, where we first enter the game. The game, of course, looks just like reality. They're wearing their hair a little different. Their clothes are slightly looser, more open. But other than that, it looks exactly the same. They transport to a video-game shop where they meet a 'game character' played by one of the longest tenured Cronenberg players, the great Robert A. Silverman (D'Arcy Nader). He's stuck in a 'game loop' as they unpack (sort of) just exactly what the game is all about...
How about that bad Irish accent? LoL. They actually comment on his accent being bad and how's not a very well-designed character. They're about to start playing a game within the game, but they first need to hook into these little micro game-pods — these fat little worm suckers instead of the blobs from the real world and these things just escape straight into their bodies...
We then cut to Pikul working at a conveyor belt, chopping up mutant amphibians. This is now the game within the game and they have assumed identities working in a game pod factory called the trout farm. He meets a man named Yevgeny Nourish, who claims to be their Realist contact. They are part of The Realists' anti-VR uprising in this 'game' and they're infiltrating the system from the inside. Like that dude on Discovery Channel, it's gross work but somebody's gotta do it...
Nourish tells him to go have lunch at the "Chinese restaurant" and to order the special. So Pikul meets up with Allegra first and she seems to get stuck in a game loop as if she's just a character in this, repeating a line of dialogue. (That's another big: Hmmm.) At the restaurant, Pikul begins to feel disoriented, so he screams "eXistenZ is paused" and wakes up back at the ski lodge...
Back in reality, Pikul still feels off and questions whether or not they ever actually left the game. But Allegra, no interest in the safe and boring real world (which, let's be honest and think about this: they're being hunted by countless, anonymous people, so it's neither of those things!) gives Pikul a kiss and convinces him to rejoin her in the game. And so they do.
The special they order turns out to be a dish of cooked two-headed mutant creatures. Pikul is repulsed by it but can't help himself from eating it (this is called a 'game urge'). As he discards the bones, he instinctively begins to assemble a gun, the same organic tooth gun from earlier...
Haha. You can't joke about assassinating a famous game designer, Pikul. Come on. No, instead, feeling the urge to kill someone and being egged on by Allegra, he shoots the Chinese waiter. The whole scene from start to finish is simply magnificent, weird and just plain awesome...
That dog? Remember that dog.
There's only 25 min left at this point, though it feels like there could be two hours and you'll find yourself kind of wishing that there were. I kept waiting for something more to happen, even though I had no idea what that might be and was totally content with what I'd already seen.
The trout farm, we learn, is owned by a rival gamer company called Cortical Systematics (which, in a sideways way, reminded me of Videodrome's Spectacular Optical). They briefly meet Nourish back at the trout farm who tells them they did good before they are magically back inside the video-game shop where we see what feels like a sly not to Crash?
Here we're introduced to another guy (Hugo Carlaw) and find out that he's killed D'Arcy Nader and that both Nader and Nourish were double agents working for Cortical Systematics all along. The Chinese waiter was actually good and his dog brought him the tooth gun. It's a bit much, but the fracturing and confusion is all purposeful...
They — somewhat magically — find themselves back inside the trout farm where Allegra attempts to port into a diseased pod. But something is immediately wrong...
Nourish returns and torches the diseased pod and it releases a cloud of deadly spores into the factory and Allegra stabs him. He tries to kill her with his flamethrower but lights a fire in the farm instead. They wake up back in reality, at the ski lodge, and Allegra says they brought the disease back from eXistenZ into this world. So she injects her pod with spore-icide, which was a very convenient thing to have on hand.
She believes that Kiri must also be a double agent, and he sabotaged Pikul's bio-port, so she plugs his bio-part up with a thing (don't worry about it). She has a lot of tools and gadgets on her all of a sudden when it was assumed she was traveling light, but no bother. It's gonna all make sense soon. We're getting there.
And then! All of a sudden, Hugo Carlaw — the Realist posing as a video-game store employees in eXistenZ — breaks through the window like he's in some goddam action flick. This convinces Pikul that they never left the game. He machine-guns Allegra's pod as they exit the lodge into what looks like a war zone: "the victory of realism" ...
But of course that guy is shot dead by Kiri with a tooth gun before he can finish the job. Kiri has defected to Cortical Systematics and now — definitively — the real world and game world have fully blended. He pleads with Allegra to join, but she shoots him with Carlaw's machine gun. A horrified Pikul is stunned and asks what the fuck she is doing? "He's only a game character," she replies. The back and forth Scooby-Doo nature of the plot might feel overwhelming, but I thought it was essential to cutting through to the final twist. (And also, why I'm sure this will be rewarding on repeat viewings.)
Allegra, at this point, has figured out that Pikul was the Realist assassin all along. Woah. That's why he never had a bio-port. And, oh yeah, that little plug she inserted into him earlier? That was a bomb. Bye-bye, Pikul...
"Have I won? Have I won the game?" The big final twist is that everyone, the whole cast — all of these excellent, essential character actors in small but expertly crafted roles — are now on stage at the church. They're wearing blue headsets and armbands instead of game-pods and Umbys, part of a test trial for game-maker company PilgrImage's new VR title, transCendenZ (gotta love this slight, highly late 90s wordplay!). This game was designed by Yevgeny Nourish who, like everybody else, wasn't just a game character. It's a wonderful scene, getting to see all these actors with their normal speaking voices unpack what they just went through...
Of course there's one more "not so fast." Of course there is. Allegra and Pikul, boyfriend-girlfriend in this 'new world', are — in fact — assassins. The couples' dog (yes, the same damn dog from the game) enters the church and they rip off a fake layer of its fur, revealing weapons which they use to kill Nourish and his assistant. I fucking love this touch...
"Death to the demon Yevgeny Nourish! Death to PilgrImage! Death to transCendenZ!"
The film ends with Allegra and Pikul confronting the Chinese waiter character, fully out of costume here, sans accent, wearing a polo shirt, a rube, the polar opposite of his game character. He tells them they don't have to kill him. And he asks them if they're still in the game. The camera holds on Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law aiming their guns but not firing. Cut to black. FIN.
I loved this one. It's really smart and layered and surprising and always fun. It is, in so many ways, the spiritual successor to Videodrome (and I'm so glad I didn't know that going, but I don't think it detracts from the experience if you do). It is nearly its equal on every count. A true work of art. 10/10!
𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚒𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 15th 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝙲𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚞𝚛𝚐 – 𝚖𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑/𝚛𝚎𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝙲𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚎𝚗𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚐'𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚕𝚖𝚘𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚙𝚑𝚢. 𝙲𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚔 𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚏𝚞𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎...
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 524 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 526 ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 524 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 526 ⫸
Existenz (stylized as eXistenZ) is a 1999 science fiction horror film written, produced and directed by David Cronenberg. The film follows Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a game designer who finds herself targeted by assassins while playing a virtual reality game of her own creation. An international co-production between Canada, the United Kingdom, and France, it also stars Jude Law, Ian Holm, Don McKellar, Callum Keith Rennie, Sarah Polley, Christopher Eccleston, Willem Dafoe, and Robert A. Silverman. It was released on April 23, 1999.
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