eXistenZ

1999 Directed by David Cronenberg

Play it. Live it. Kill for it.

A game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game has been damaged.

Jennifer Jason Leigh Jude Law Ian Holm Willem Dafoe Don McKellar Callum Keith Rennie Christopher Eccleston Sarah Polley Robert A. Silverman Oscar Hsu Kris Lemche Vik Sahay Kirsten Johnson James Kirchner Balázs Koós Stephanie Belding Gerry Quigley

Alternative Titles

Crimes of the Future, eXistenZ - Du bist das Spiel

science fiction horror action thriller

97 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by BRAT ★★★½ 2

extra half star because jude law says "i have this phobia about having my body... penetrated"
Review by Kenned Lehmann ★★★★★ 6

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

This is really one of my all time favorite movies, but i might be in the minority. I can understand why it get so much hate from some people, it's not exactly breaking new ground with the whole "reality vs. illusion" theme, and it's a very strange, creepy and trippy movie. Also the acting is not always the best.
So why do i like it so much? Well, eXistenZ has something that none of the other "reality vs. illusion" movies have, in my oppinion of course. Im not saying that eXistenZ is particularly clever, deep or philosophical, not on a logical level anyway. While other "reality vs. illusion" movies can make me question reality - just a little bit at…
Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 5

Maybe my favorite Cronenberg now - layers and layers of "spaces" overlapped until the distinction between the virtual and the real can no longer be distinguished. This is constructed so meticulously - placing characters within a virtual world, governed by virtual laws - but this also depicts the virtual-nature of our basic standards of living: you wake up, you eat, you go to work, you have lunch, you go home, you have dinner, etc. In-between, everything becomes a game: alliances, relationships, sex, even eating food. By the end, we have no clue whether we are seeing a "game" or "reality." But it doesn't matter - for Cronenberg, they're one and the same. Masterpiece.
Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★★

"I'm very worried about my body."
No truer line spoken in a Cronenberg script.
Review by Brianna ★★★★

was this the first inception
Review by Adam Friedland 8

Best cronenberg imo smd
Review by Tony the Terror😼🏳️‍🌈 👻 ★★★★★ 10

Hooptober V
21/31: selected directors

Can you even believe I had never seen this before? I can’t really believe I had never seen this before, but then I kinda can because it came out during my super heavy party days and I was too Busy Philipps for a movie. But still, I never got around to it til now wtfffff. I also can’t believe that Cronenberg isn’t a name I often shout out when rattling off my favorite directors to anyone who will listen, but that’s probably because I’m a little bitter about him straying from the true horror path although even his newer stuff is pretty amazing so maybe I just need to bring him into the top tier fold.…
Review by PTAbro ★★★ 3

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

It's been a while since a finale has turned my opinion of a film from the negative to the positive so quickly and completely, but with eXistenZ, Cronenberg manages to salvage most of the confusion and campiness of the preceding 80 minutes and actually makes it work, marginally. Make no mistake - the rest of the movie is bizarre, sloppy, and really only worthwhile for the visual ingenuity of Cronenberg's obvious delight in practical effects and their implementation. However silly the rest of it is - terrible accents, ludicrous scenarios even in the context of the film universe, and a seeming disregard for conventional narrative structure - I had to begrudgingly applaud Cronenberg for fooling me so completely.
So. Does…
Review by BRAT ★★★½

i don't think anyone's ever seen this movie but it's the best movie ever made
EDIT: i was really high when i watched it & reviewed it & it's not really the best movie ever made but it's a good time
Review by matt lynch ★★½ 2

"But it's a game everybody's already playing."
Lot of eyerollers like that in here, but even though it feels kind of repetitive for Cronenberg, I like all the stuff about shifting virtual identities and artificial worlds superseding and/or merging with biological ones. The bigger problem is this seems like a shitty boring game.
Review by WraithApe ★★★★★ 9

"Death to the demoness Allegra Geller! Death to Antenna Research!"
A botched assassination attempt on the life of Antenna's star game designer begins a dizzying descent into the VR multiverse. Marketing trainee and gaming novice Ted Pikul finds himself entering into a virtual world so enveloping it leaves the gamer questioning the very nature of reality. Where does the game world end and the real one begin? Is it subjective? Do we in fact construct our own realities in exactly the same way the game does?
"We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world... whose rules and objectives are largely unknown... seemingly indecipherable or possibly nonexistent... always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."…
Review by TheCultureShocker ★½ 1

I might have actually given a shit for 25% of the movie.
Was looking forward to this one a bit, even if I'm not a huge Cronenberg fan. I just think this came too early and didn't have much to say. I'm sorry, I really wanted to like this but I was really bored. :(

Recent reviews

Review by Poison ★★★½

Jennifer Jason Leighd me straight to hell
Review by austin

all hail the amphibian flesh
Review by Tom Jeffrey ★★★★

The movie that asks the higher question, “ARE WE STILL INSIDE THE GAME RIGHT NOW??”
I love Cronenberg movies and here we see a mixed bag of the first 20+ years of his career: Science fiction, nasty props, puppetry, gore, horniness, uncertainty, people w 2 buttholes, all put together in a fun way while still not having a good understanding of video games
Watch to see Jude Law get his back blown out
Review by mark ★★★★

This is disorienting lol
Review by lidless ★★★★

I wish my gaming PC was a lot fleshier and plugged into my spine, but I can dream and watch David Cronenberg's 1999 cyber thriller eXistenZ
Review by Barnesnoble ★★★★

Wasn’t expecting miracles from this so was surprised to find I enjoyed it as much as I did. Works for the ‘90s like Videodrome worked for the ‘80s: A live dissection of the dangers of gaming and VR, the true video nasties of their age. Sure Jude’s accent may slip a few times (“EXISTENZ IS PAAAUUUUUSED!!”) but I took it in the irreverent, gonzo spirit of Cronenberg at his wildest and weirdest. Almost expected the X Files theme to start playing over the end. One of a handful of actually solid video-game themed movies.
Review by ethan ★★★★★

cinema was invented so ppl like david cronenberg could put absolute freak weirdo shit on the silver screen
Review by Charliehk

I’m sure this is one that I will go back and forth on quite a bit, but just coming out of it, it didn’t work that well for me. Visualizing the idea of people’s obsession/reliance on technology and escapism as a very sexual bodily process is really interesting and super effective, but the actual themes and ideas that it’s in service of feel like they’ve been explored and talked about in a thousand other places, and it didn’t totally feel like Cronenberg brought a lot to that discussion. The exploration of free will within machines was probably the films most interesting question, but it kind of felt like it got dropped somewhere along the line? The ending was also a…
Review by heather ★★★½

hey what the fuck! genuinely could have gone my whole life without seeing the bioports or the teeth gun but i guess that’s good body horror
the ultimate FMV... this gave me similar feelings as shrooms give me??? hm
Review by sina ★★★★½

What if... 👉👈 A USB cable plugged into your butt 😳 and you liked it? 😩
Honesty, I had a lot of fun watching this movie, it does its thing well and I really enjoy 90s cyberspace stories
Review by Rodrigo ★★★½

Mr. Cronenberg really said: “Lol go outside, you nerds.”
Review by Chandler ★★½

Is this a stonkingly good movie? No
Did I have fun watching it? Yes
Pls can someone caress my bioport