Metacritic reviews

This is not light-hearted entertainment. Be prepared to think. Uncle Dave will take you someplace new.

eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!

Cronenberg is one of the cinema's true originals, and a trip to his spooky world is always a harrowing, thought-provoking experience.

Cronenberg, who both wrote and directed, is out to fool you -- to give you just enough information to let you figure out what's going on, and then bluff you out of using it. The movie, in other words, is a game itself.

Its name, the film's title, is pronounced "eggs is tense" and meant to have a whiff of the philosophical, even if its intellectual ambition seems mostly limited to spelling affectations.

Dead-on for Cronenberg fans though the mutant reptile and amphibian factory might be a tad(pole) too much for the squeamish at heart.

Because of the potential of the idea and Cronenberg's reputation as a film maker, it's a real disappointment to watch eXistenZ fall apart the way it does.

The performances are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.