SOURCE: “Game Boy,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 9, No. 3, April, 1999, pp. 8–10.

In the following review, Rodley discusses the comedy, the double meanings, and the various levels of reality in the film eXistenZ.

eXistenZ. It’s new. And it’s here. It’s a virtual-reality game that’s almost indistinguishable from lived experience and it’s also the new movie from David Cronenberg. What’s more, it’s the first wholly original creation from the director since Videodrome (1982)—the film his fans regard as his quintessential work because it most effectively captures the alarming nature of the cinema’s invasion of the passive self. eXistenZ is Videodrome’s inverse twin, in which the interactive self invades cinema.

I talked to Cronenberg in London, a city which greeted his last cinema release Crash (1996) with an uproar of tabloid outrage. He’d just arrived from the Berlin Film Festival where eXistenZ...