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Existenz
The Nickel Cinema117-119 Clerkenwell Road, London
Sat 22 Aug · 18:30
About this event
Game design as body horror; virtual reality as wetware infection. David Cronenberg’s late-century provocation drops us into a near-future where entertainment isn’t streamed or projected but surgically plugged into the spine. Organic consoles pulse like exposed organs, bio-ports gape in the lower back, and reality itself flickers under interrogation. This is conspiracy thriller reduced to viscera: guns grown from bone, fast-food mutations, corporate espionage played out in abattoirs and back rooms. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s celebrity game designer navigates shifting layers of simulation with manic conviction, while Jude Law plays the neophyte dragged — willingly or not — into recursive worlds where authorship, agency, and even identity are up for grabs. Cronenberg treats technology not as sleek futurism but as penetrative biology. Every interface is sexual, every system unstable. eXistenZ doesn’t ask whether we’re inside a game; it suggests the question is already obsolete.
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