Long before the Metaverse, Oculus, and Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed speculative sci-fi series, master director David Cronenberg plumbed the depths of virtual reality’s implications with his fleshy, frantic masterpiece Existenz. Featuring an uncanny lead performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh as the “game pod goddess” whose creations kick off the intrigue, as well as Jude Law and Willem Dafoe, it’s an utterly unique vision of video gaming and the horror that can ensue when it bleeds into reality.
That said, Existenz is also very much a David Cronenberg film. And the creator of Videodrome, The Fly, and Crash does not disappoint on the disturbing visual front: game consoles resemble fetus-aliens, spines are lubed-up and penetrated, and Cronenberg’s virtual reality looks like none before or since. In its multiple layers of reality and unnerving “NPCs,” Existenz even presages Christopher Nolan’s Inception — albeit on a much smaller scale and budget. In ambition, however, this gooey head trip belongs in the top echelons of science fiction.
‘Existenz’ Makes Video Games and Their NPCs Into the Stuff of Nightmares
The basic setup for Existenz is simple: Leigh’s oddly alluring game designer, Allegra Geller, is on the run from assassins, likely working for a corporate rival, who fire guns made of bone and teeth (so they can breeze through metal detectors). She enlists Jude Law’s technophobe security guard, Ted Pikul, to protect her and her latest creation, the titular game. However, the game console in Existenz is not like any you’ve ever seen. A pulsating, flesh-colored lump with an umbilical cord, Geller’s game pods plug directly into a hole in the user’s spine. And once Geller and Pikul jack in, all bets are off on what is reality for the rest of the film.
Leigh and Law give the sort of oddly mannered and distanced performances that are common in Cronenberg films, and they’re joined by similarly eerie characters like a gas station owner named … Gas. Played by Willem Dafoe at his grinningly unnerving best, Gas volunteers to install a “bioport” in Pikul’s spine and insists he runs a gas station “only on the most pathetic level of reality.” Gas is also almost certainly an NPC (non-player character) in Geller’s virtual reality.
For as little as Existenz looks like any video game or virtual world audiences have seen before (Roger Ebert described it in 1999 as a “backwoods world that looks like it was ordered over the phone from L.L. Bean), Cronenberg evinces a wry understanding of the frustration that can come with NPC interactions in a game. Waiters in a Chinese restaurant that serves ungodly alien creatures stubbornly repeat the same canned phrases until Pikul delivers a specific line to trigger their next scripted behavior. Pikul and Geller both experience terrifying, violent urges in the game as well, as they realize they have no control over their characters’ destiny in a virtual world. It’s all brilliantly funny, sometimes frightening stuff.
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Cronenberg’s Bodily Violations Reach Gruesome New Heights in ‘Existenz’
From the moment James Woods discovered a vaginal slit in his abdomen, into which he could insert videotapes, in 1983’s Videodrome to the sex scenes of Crash in 1996, Cronenberg has obsessed over the disturbing intersection between technology and the human body. With Existenz, and virtual reality as his subject, he finds delirious new heights to scale, with plenty of nasty practical effects along for the ride. The film is full of holes (trypophobes, be very cautious), and the moment when Law’s character has one drilled into his spine by what looks like a jackhammer is topped only when his game character later licks Geller’s lubed-up bioport.
Perhaps the film’s centerpiece, the Chinese restaurant sequence, features a “special” consisting of alien or mutant creatures the viewer is better off discovering for themselves. The sound effects of Law slurping it down are truly something special, though — and that’s before he assembles the bones into a gun, in a “genuine game urge” he’s unable to resist. Existenz is the platonic ideal of a Cronenberg take on video games, losing none of his patented body horror while wryly commenting on what humanity gives up as it cedes more ground to the virtual.
It’s also an incredibly funny film, though, from the deeply weird performances and matter-of-fact dialogue revolving around bioports and mutants to Law fending off Dafoe with a wrench as the “gas station owner” menaces him with the aforementioned bioport device. Unsurprisingly, Existenz did not set the box office on fire, grossing a mere $2.9 million. And to this day, it’s a criminally underrated piece of Cronenberg’s filmography, coming just before his dip into more commercial territory with widely-acclaimed thrillers like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. His most recent work has been more defiantly personal, featuring meditations on grief and the responsibility of the artist in his signature, unnerving style; Existenz was perhaps the last “classic” Cronenberg film.
Although it was made in the late-1990s, Existenz manages to feel completely out of time, thanks to its drab, lived-in virtual world and odd performances. And that makes it also feel completely of the now in 2026, as humanity explores further frontiers in virtual living — and discovers the consequences. Most of all, it’s a straight-up masterpiece of science fiction and body horror that fans of either, and of video games, simply must experience.
