Synopsis

Sometime in the near future, the public is getting more into the cyber games and the trend is becoming more like as a religion."eXistenZ" created by a game designer, Alegra, is an interactive simulation game which sets a pointed end among the current cyber games. The game enables an interplay between various characters. Combined with neurotic systems and having had an excellent sense of directon in accordance with each individual's reaction, it goes over the line between the body and soul and leads to a psy chedelic experience that might cross over the line between the reality and the illusion. Giving a trial performance, Alegra realizes she is being threatened to death by a group of anti-existentialist composed of realists who are against virtual reality. Fortunately, she is rescued by security guard, Ted and he joins the game as Alegra;s partner and guard. Alegra is getting addicted to the gamre and Ted warns Alegra of the danger of the game's toxic nature. But after all, he is also getting addicted to the game together with Alegra..... David Cronenberg has obsessively expressed his interest in combining industrial machneries with human organs through his works such as Scanners, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, Crash in his filmography.And his thirteenth film, eXistenZ has expanded the extenet fo self-dissolution and speculation on others, in technology combined with anatomical images. In that sense, there must not be such a subject more suitable for David Cronenberg than the cyber game which smuggles into huma neurotic systems and crosses over the line between reality and virtuality. This movie, inspired by the idea of Satanic Verses Writer, Salman Rushdie, combined with his long-pursed premise that a man creates his own reality, and becomes a futuristic apocalypse. Analogous to Scanners in visual mages and closer to Videodrome in a sense of media-critical message, eXistenZ won ana Art Achievement Award at 1998's Berlin Film Festival in pros and cons.

Diretor

David CRONENBERG

Born in Canada in 1943, Cronenberg is a director who pursues auteurism in the horror film genre. He gained recognition with his film Videodrome (1982), which viciously and satirically explores the violence of media, seamlessly intertwining the realms of consciousness and the unconscious. He later made his Hollywood debut with The Fly (1986), which achieved worldwide success. Based on a William Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch (1991) meticulously depicts the eruption of inherent evil within humans. Cronenberg, exploring the anxieties surrounding the erosion of basic human desires by an advancing scientific civilization, is regarded as one of the directors who emerged in the 20th century with a unique cinematic universe.