Critic Reviews
70
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
21(72%)
mixed
6(21%)
negative
2(7%)
Showing 29 Critic Reviews
100
Gets diagnosably schizo.
100
Leigh is perfectly cast as the game-pod goddess.
90
This is not light-hearted entertainment. Be prepared to think. Uncle Dave will take you someplace new.
90
eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.
90
The Cronenberg trademarks are here in full force, including an outrageous sexual suggestiveness in his bizarre special effects.
88
With his usual consummate visual skills and his flair for the nauseatingly audacious, David Cronenberg’s written (spottily) and directed (stunningly) a movie that often makes you feel as if you'd lost contact with reality: a twisted, nightmarish tale of futuristic reality games and a couple on the run. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.D]
80
Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!
80
Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker.
80
Audaciously combining conviction and childish humor, this SF thriller reminds us that the distinction between the tangible and the intangible may be frighteningly arbitrary--an idea that's made too scary ever to seem trivial, no matter how silly things get.
80
Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain."
