eXistenZ (1997) Directed by David Cronenberg

While this may be the closest thing we've ever gotten to a blockbuster from Cronenberg, it's still as horny, grotesque and bizarre as one would expect from him.

It will never be my favourite Cronenberg - a tad too silly, a little undercooked and convoluted, lacking in the deeper psychosexual excavation trademark of films like Crash and Videodrome - but it is an extremely fun watch with stellar turns from Willem Dafoe and Christopher Eccleston doing a ridiculous New York accent.

eXistenZ now feels curiously nostalgic. Reminiscent of a time when the potentialities of tech felt far more open, with far more revolutionary possibility than they do now. It belongs to a canon of nineties films that did not necessarily see technology as utopian, but as something that had power to be subversive, something that could reshape our relationship with ourselves and allow us to form and manipulate realities.

The bioports and game devices in eXistenZ look like blobject technology made flesh, triggering a pang of yearning in me for my old walkman, the tactility of nineties technology, all big buttons and hard plastic, foam and chrome and silicone.

There was an eroticism to technology in the nineties that has been lost since, captured here by Cronenberg. Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh tongue and finger each other's bioports in what may be one of the most explicit depictions of penetration ever put on film outside of pornography. Nineties kids will remember plugging aux cords into supple silicone ports, surely where Cronenberg got some of his inspiration.

eXistenZ is not a pro or anti technology movie - Cronenberg steers clear of spoon-feeding audiences any kind of simple morality. What it does presciently depict is a world in which technology is fully integrated into our bodies. While certainly not utopian, I can't help but think it looks a little bit more fun.