eXistenZ (71)

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Starring: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Don McKellar, Ian Holm

The Pitch: In a future where electronic games are downloaded directly into your body (via a surgically-implanted "bioport"), games-designer extraordinaire Allegra Geller, on the run from corporate assassins, hooks up with nerdy intern Ted Pikul ; but games and reality have a tendency to get confused...

Theo Sez: Sixteen years after VIDEODROME here's the "New Flesh" finally made, er, flesh in this highly enjoyable re-tread of this director's favourite turf, the FX-laden gross-out with disturbing socio-political overtones - albeit not, in this case, allowed to overwhelm the more multiplex-friendly elements. A certain trash sensibility has often been the spine of Cronenberg's work - even VIDEODROME begins as a kind of B-thriller, with our hero investigating amid dire warnings and don't-go-there speeches - but this never really morphs into abstract contemplation halfway through, the way most of the others do, stays on the level of a cheesy road-movie. Yet the feel for our hidden anxieties remains as sure as ever, those fears underlying our (post-)modern lives though we only dimly acknowledge them - above all the fear of losing our bodies, ceding control to the technology around us, fear that what we put into our bodies is processed and modified, no longer pure or even knowable (the odious Chinese restaurant serving unidentifiable "specials"), constant fear of "infection" (triggering off associations both with AIDS and computer viruses) : the film's power lies in anchoring "virtual-reality" paranoia in graphic physicality, rescuing it from TRUMAN SHOW modishness - it's about our bodies being violated, all the physical things they represent being lost to us. All of which may be why the film's more mechanical elements - twist-ridden narrative, one-dimensional characters - don't actually kill it, maybe even make it stronger (at least on first viewing, when the twists can still work) : it's like a new, 21st-century kind of entertainment - fast, cool, faceless - except with our messy 20th-century fears gnawing away beneath the surface. Not always successful, with a notably awful ending, but it works on various levels, not least as an auteurist's delight : certainly - with its metallic light, underpopulated compositions, doomy Howard Shore score and constant emphasis on crypto-sexual transgressions - nobody else could've made it.