Even 25 years later, this film remains one of the most audacious sci-fi ever

Released in 1999, existence Of David Cronenberg it’s one of those films that time has never really tamed. Indeed, the more technology has insinuated itself into our daily lives, the more disturbing and visionary this work appears surprisingly prophetic. At the time welcomed with enthusiasm by critics but with a certain coldness by the public, existence it remained in a gray area for a long time, crushed by the cultural impact of other contemporary titles. Yet, today it is increasingly evident how much contemporary science fiction cinema owes something precisely to this body horror disguised as a technological thriller.

Cronenberg arriva a existence in a particular phase of his career, after the sensorial violence of Crash and before the drier and more narrative turn of A History of Violence. The film tells the story of the forced escape of Allegra Gellera famous video game designer, forced to take refuge within her own creation after an assassination attempt by a group of “realist” fanatics, hostile to virtual reality. But as often happens in Cronenberg’s cinema, the plot is only a starting point: it soon becomes impossible to distinguish what is real from what is simulated, and each narrative level risks being, in turn, a game within another game.

This continuous slippage between levels of reality is one of the aspects that make existence still so radical today. The film refuses any reassuring basis, offers no certainties or definitive explanations and ends with a deliberately ambiguous ending, which forces the viewer to question what he has just seen. A choice which, years later, appears anything but gratuitous: Cronenberg is not interested in telling a future dominated by technology, but in staging the fragility of human perception in a world in which the boundary between experience and simulation is increasingly blurred.

It’s no coincidence that existence comes out almost simultaneously with Matrixsharing some anxieties related to the turn of the millennium, the fear of systems collapse and the growing dependence on digital networks and interfaces. But if the Wachowskis’ film chooses a more accessible and mythological form, Cronenberg takes the opposite path: dirty, visceral, deeply corporeal. Technology, in existenceit is never neutral or elegant. It is organic, moist, grafted into the flesh through biological gates that transform the human body into an extension of the machine.

And it is here that the film reveals its most lasting legacy. Unlike much previous science fiction, obsessed with the destruction and mutilation of the body, existence proposes an idea of hybridization that is not only horrifying, but also potentially liberating. The fusion between organism and technology is not presented as an inevitable condemnation, but rather as an evolutionary possibilityambiguous but not necessarily negative. An intuition that anticipates many of the subsequent reflections on the post-human, influencing – directly or indirectly – works such as Inception, Paprika and numerous sci-fi of the 2000s.

The performances of. contribute to making the film even more destabilizing Jude Law e Jennifer Jason Leighcalled to move in a world where every gesture, every joke, every choice could be dictated by an invisible script. None of the characters really seem to be in control of their actions, and the constant feeling is that of find yourself within a programmed realitywhere even free will is an illusion.

Today, existence appears more relevant than ever in an era dominated by virtual realities, artificial intelligence and increasingly fluid digital identities. It is not an easy film, nor designed to please everyone. But precisely for this reason it continues to establish itself as one of the most audacious and uncomfortable experiments of modern science fiction, capable of anticipating our present long before it was ready to welcome it.

Font: ScreenRant