It starts with the testing of a new virtual reality gaming system called eXistenZ. No matter how good PlayStation 2 may be, it can't hold a candle to the VR games people play in this movie. Using ports ("biojacks") installed at the base of the spine (ah, the Cronenberg motif of technology and biology merging makes an appearance), people jack into the games, which are indistinguishable from reality. The game control unit (called a pod) is an organic lump of flesh that looks kind of like a fetus that attaches to players' biojacks through an umbilical cord.

During the first beta test of eXistenZ, some Luddite attempts to assassinate Allegra, the master game maker who created eXistenZ, but he just shoots her in the shoulder. A PR man (Ted) for the software company rescues her, and they go on the lam. Allegra realizes that her pod--which contains the only copy of eXistenZ in existence--was injured during the shooting, and the only way to discover the extent of the damage is to go into the game. She and Ted jack in, and soon they're playing a VR game in the eXistenZ world--a game within a game. They discover that a resistance movement called the Realists is trying to destroy the game world. At some point, Ted "pauses" the game so he and Allegra can come out of it. But are they really out? They go back in, but are they really in? Or out? The levels of reality and game quickly become so intertwined that you have no idea what's what. If you think Cronenberg's going to sort it out for you . . . well, welcome to reality.

The film has an interesting visual style, much of it looking like an odd mélange of retro-1950s combined with the future (in this way, it reminds me to a degree of Gattaca, but not that extreme or austere). True to the director's overall vision, things that are typically technological have become biological--the squishy game pods, a gun that shoots teeth instead of bullets, a lumpy, glowing cell phone, and so on. The process of jacking into the bioport, an aperture just above the derriere, is given erotic treatment, with a gently mocking touch being that Ted is uncomfortable about being penetrated.

I was bothered by the most obvious stretch in the plot: Allegra spent five years and $38 million designing eXistenZ ("the only thing that can give my life any meaning"), but she didn't make a backup copy of it?? That one pod was her only copy? I back up everything I write. Hasn't she heard of a Zip drive, for Christ's sake?