Weird Wednesdays: Press Start, Feel Everything: Touch and Reality in eXistenZ

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) is a film deeply concerned with the instability of reality, but its most unsettling questions are not communicated through abstract philosophy. Instead, Cronenberg makes the body the primary site of uncertainty. Through grotesque biotechnology, sexual imagery, and an almost obsessive emphasis on bodily sensation, eXistenZ asks what happens when the distinction between the physical and virtual world becomes impossible to recognize. At the center of this confusion is physical touch. In eXistenZ, touching another person is not simply an expression of intimacy; it is one of the few ways characters attempt to determine what is real. Yet Cronenberg repeatedly undermines even that reassurance, suggesting that physical sensation can be manipulated just as easily as sight or sound.

The story follows Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a famous game designer whose newest virtual-reality game, eXistenZ, has been targeted by an assassin. She escapes with Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a marketing employee who becomes her reluctant companion. Together, they enter the game in an attempt to determine whether it has been damaged and whether another assassination attempt is coming. What follows is a deliberately confusing journey through layers of reality in which the characters—and the audience—are constantly forced to question what is actually happening. 

The emphasis on bodily contact becomes particularly important in Allegra and Ted’s relationship. Their physical interactions initially carry the awkwardness of two people who do not completely trust one another. The game violates a familiar boundary: technology is no longer something humans operate externally but something that enters and becomes connected to the body. The film consequently makes touch feel dangerous. To connect with another person, or even with a machine, means surrendering some control.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is how physical Cronenberg makes gaming. Modern audiences are accustomed to thinking of games as something experienced through controllers, screens, headsets, and increasingly immersive technology. eXistenZ takes that concept to an extreme by making the game itself organic. The game itself is accessed through a living organic game pod that connects directly to the player’s nervous system. The connection requires the disturbing insertion of a bio-port, a small opening in the player’s spine. From the beginning, Cronenberg makes technology intensely physical. There is no sterile computer screen separating the player from the game. Instead, technology penetrates the body. The virtual world is entered through flesh, turning the act of gaming into something intimate and invasive. The imagery is intentionally disgusting, but it also makes an interesting argument: if games become immersive enough, where does the game end and the player begin?

Yet touch also becomes a means of establishing intimacy. Allegra and Ted gradually become physically closer as they move through the game, and their sexual encounter is particularly significant because it seems to provide a moment of genuine human connection. However, Cronenberg refuses to let the audience accept this intimacy at face value. If the characters can experience physical pleasure inside a simulation, then sensation itself can no longer guarantee authenticity. A person can feel desire, pain, fear, or pleasure without knowing whether the experience originates in the physical world.

What makes the film particularly fascinating today is that its attitude toward gaming is not entirely negative. It would be easy to interpret eXistenZ as a warning about people becoming too absorbed in virtual worlds, but I think the film gives gaming considerably more credit than that. The characters are not simply escaping reality because they hate it. They are curious, creative, social, and emotionally invested in the worlds they enter. Allegra especially treats game design much like an art form. Her games are experiences that people enter, explore, and interpret. Viewed from today’s perspective, that feels surprisingly contemporary. Games have increasingly become recognized as storytelling mediums capable of creating emotional experiences, building communities, and allowing players to participate in narratives rather than simply observe them.

This is where physical touch becomes so important. In eXistenZ, seeing is not enough. The characters need to touch, interact, and physically respond to the world around them. Touch appears to offer certainty. If something can be felt, then surely it must be real. Cronenberg repeatedly destroys that assumption. This is one of the film’s most disturbing ideas: physical sensation is not necessarily evidence of reality. The body itself becomes part of the illusion; the characters can touch simulated objects and people and respond to them physically. Consequently, the distinction between “real” and “virtual” becomes almost meaningless because both experiences are capable of producing genuine bodily reactions.

After moving through multiple apparent layers of reality, Allegra and Ted confront the possibility that the world they believe to be real is itself another game. Their final question—whether they are still inside the game—has no reassuring answer. Cronenberg leaves the audience with the same uncertainty: if reality can perfectly reproduce physical sensation, then there may be no reliable sensory test for distinguishing reality from simulation. If the body experiences genuine pleasure, does it matter whether the circumstances producing that pleasure are artificial?

That question feels even more relevant now than it did when the film was released. Gaming today is no longer universally treated as an isolated or childish pastime. Virtual spaces can become genuine parts of people's lives. eXistenZ understands something important about this: an experience does not necessarily become meaningless simply because it occurs inside a constructed world. The emotions produced by a fictional environment can still be real.

Cronenberg’s greatest achievement is that he never gives us an easy answer about whether this is ultimately good or bad. The film is skeptical of technology, but it is also fascinated by it. The grotesque game pods are repulsive, yet they are also strangely beautiful in their biological design. The game creates paranoia, but it also creates curiosity and intimacy. Gaming can become an escape, but it can also be a form of exploration.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law are also excellent together. Their performances help ground what could otherwise become an excessively abstract film. Leigh plays Allegra with an eccentric confidence that makes it believable that she could be both a celebrated designer and someone completely comfortable with the bizarre technology she has created. Law's Ted provides a more skeptical perspective, allowing the audience to experience the strangeness of the game through his discomfort.

Ultimately, eXistenZ is a film about gaming, but it is also a film about human connection. Its strangest images are built around the idea that technology can enter the body, while its most intimate moments remind us that humans still crave physical contact. The irony is that the more convincingly technology reproduces sensation, the harder it becomes to determine whether sensation itself can be trusted.

That ambiguity is precisely why I love eXistenZ. It is weird, unsettling, occasionally hilarious, and visually unforgettable, but beneath its grotesque imagery is a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of gaming, intimacy, and reality. Cronenberg does not simply present technology as something that separates us from what is real; instead, he recognizes that the experiences we have within artificial worlds can still produce genuine emotions and connections. The worlds we enter may be constructed, but what we feel inside them can be completely real. In that sense, the film feels remarkably ahead of its time, particularly as gaming has evolved into an increasingly immersive and social form of storytelling.

At the same time, eXistenZ never allows physical touch to become a completely reliable measure of reality. Touch is our most intimate connection to the world and to other people, yet Cronenberg makes it one of our greatest vulnerabilities by showing how easily the body can become part of an illusion. If technology can reproduce sensation convincingly enough, then even the physical experience of touch can no longer prove that something is real. That tension is what makes the film so compelling to me: it leaves us questioning whether reality is defined by what we can touch or by what we genuinely experience. Nearly three decades later, eXistenZ remains strange, provocative, and remarkably relevant—and for all of these reasons, it earns five stars from me.

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