When Allegra (Jennifer Jason Leigh) enters the room a reverential hush sets in. After all, she is the reigning gaming goddess about to premiere eXistenZ, an organic gaming system that taps your fears and desires. Attached via a bioport, the MetaFlesh Game-Pod jacks directly into the player's nervous system, unleashing an unpredictable cascade of fantasy. But the demo is disturbed by an anti-eXistenZialists raid and Allegra is forced to flee, along with her bodyguard Pikul (Jude Law). Drawing on the fleshy prosthetics of his earlier Videodrome (1983) and the hallucinatory conundrum that is Naked Lunch (1991), director Cronenberg here tenders a shape-shifting story that mirrors the calamitous plunge into the game itself. In eXistenZ's phantasmagoric construct, the markers of reality fall away as each new incident reshapes the imagined surroundings. Perhaps, by definition, it's no longer a game if you can't tell where existence ends and eXistenZ begins.