An interesting and well-made film without emotional resonance. This is a problem I've had with all the Cronenberg films I remember seeing, a lot of intellectual concepts and tiresome personal obsessions (every film will have some gross little scrotal invention(s) to explore David's concerns with the transformation of the human body in the XX/XI century anew) and not enough cultivation of an exquisite audio-visual experience, which is what makes a great film worth seeing over and over again. There's a bit too much of the classroom in David's films – and a bit too much of David in them as well, for me at least.
This is not to say that Cronenberg isn't a talented director, capable of crafting impressive images and strange, spasmodic atmospheres constantly teetering on the edge of stability; rather, that I find his aesthetic emotionally limited. His art is not subordinated to humility, heroism, human feelings, but to the Idea, the Theory, the Literary – in this case, a philosophical exploration of virtual reality's endpoint as a bottomless Chinese box of simulacra without any underlying true reality. In this sense, eXistenZ, admirably, is the anti-The Matrix, the anti-Andrew Tate. There is no sententious idea in Cronenberg of a transcendent reality that the select few know how to escape to. All of us are stuck in an ocean of media together and we just have to keep swimming.
The most beautiful idea in the film is the romance between Pikul and Allegra – or rather, the question of if there is any romance between them. At the film's end, we think we've discovered that they are indeed lovers, but then this is revealed to be only another level of the simulation. Is there any real love between them, or is it the conventions of a simulation narrative pushing them together? The answer is somewhere in the void of the bullet hole in Allegra's shoulder.
I watched The Substance tonight. The experience very nearly tempted me to raise my score by 0.5, but I will stick to 3/5.
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