****
Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law
Director: David Cronenberg
Rating: R18
Review: Russell Baillie
David Cronenberg - the Canadian director whose films have scoured a dark path of the cerebral, carnal and the visceral - has finally left his bookshelf alone.
While he's recently done Burroughs (The Naked Lunch) and Ballard (Crash), in
eXistenZ Cronenberg loosely adapts that great storyteller of our times - PlayStation ... well, really, the role-playing games offered by the likes of games consoles and personal computers.
In eXistenZ he's playfully contemplating the blur between virtual reality and the real stuff. No, there's nothing new in that and this certainly doesn't set out to top the The Matrix for whizzbang cyber-cool stuff.
But it does offer an involved Chinese box of a story - an assassination plot of a kind where, inevitably, nothing is as it seems.
Cronenberg is obviously in a playful mood with mordant humour and his trademark yuck-factor, which here extends to games consoles which connect to the players by way of a spinal-tapped bioport, and a flesh-and-bone gun which fires human teeth.
The weirdness begins when star game designer Allegra Geller (Leigh) goes on the run with hapless PR man Ted (Law) following an attempt on her life when a terrorist group declares a sort of anti-VR fatwa.
They switch in and out of the layers of her game, a virtual world which Cronenberg neatly tweaks into an uneasy twilight zone of oddball characters and curious lingo.
With his biological games hardware - complete with umbilical cord and, well, nipples - Cronenberg makes a crude joke or two at the expense of those obsessed with violent escapism as entertainment, though he's done that before in 1983 with his then prescient Videodrome.
No, the ideas in eXistenZ are not new, but they are presented in a canny, darkly funny and fresh way which also makes this Cronenberg's best film in years.
Can't wait for the game version, myself.
