At 174th place at the box office, eXistenZ was not one of the big hits of 1999, though the it has some proud company in the 170s, including The Limey, Cradle Will Rock, Princess Mononoke, and Jawbreaker

It’s not clear that it ever had the makings of a runaway hit, but it can’t have helped that another heady sci-fi thriller about people who aren’t sure if the reality they exist in is real (and it isn’t) was released three weeks earlier in the form of The Matrix. 

Cronenberg was hardly a bankable commercial director, either, and the gooey, heady, psychosexual horror-scifi mashup struggled to find an audience.

But critics liked eXistenz. It has a 74 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 68 Metacritic score with fairly comparable audience scores on both sites. 

And, as we discover in this episode, it was oddly prescient on so many levels and way, way ahead of its time. 

This week, John and Jenn welcome back Julia Sirmons, a fan of both weird Davids (Lynch and Cronenberg), as we learned in our The Straight Story episode, and friend of the network Jess Collins, who loves eXistenZ and is apparently really into movies that Sarah Polley made in 1999.