No David Cronenberg film is really complete until you’ve seen it twice, which makes him an ideal candidate for this reevaluation series. In 1999, eXistenZ got slightly lost amid the surprise hype of The Matrix and the manufactured hype of The Phantom Menace. It seemed like a strong movie then, and in some ways even stronger now. Double identities, the mind-body split, infection, the divide between reality and illusion and innovative forms of sex have been pet Cronenberg themes as long as he’d made movies; in eXistenZ, these ideas have gained in resonance in light of A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007).

Like those films, eXistenZ is a movie with “no fat on it,” as Viggo Mortensen has said of History. Indeed, it’s hard to think of another contemporary filmmaker whose films are so rich with double meanings, and who’s consistently capable of such Hitchcockian density in his narratives. In the movie, gaming can variously be read as a metaphor for sexual initiation, anti-government protest, rules of social behavior, drug use and filmmaking. (To paraphrase Jennifer Jason Leigh’s celebrity game designer, Allegra Geller: On a film set, as with game playing, there’s only enough free will to keep it interesting.)

One thing I’d forgotten was the high level of creativity in the creature design work and gore effects. (The movie somehow manages to up the ante on Cronenberg’s previous Crash by inventing even weirder formers of penetration.) Much was made of History of Violence’s cartoonish fight sequences; on repeat viewings of eXistenZ, it’s even easier to appreciate the way characters seem blocked robotically from the start. More subtly, the film is also a terrific showcase for Cronenberg’s talents as a screenwriter. (He often employs a terse noir idiom. “I suppose the smaller-caliber pistols would have to fire baby teeth,” Allegra says, after discovering the gun that almost killed her uses teeth for bullets. “The tooth fairy could go into the arms business.”) It’s a more coherent nightmare than Cronenberg’s Videodrome—a generally terrific film that eXistenZ, with its world of bioports and rogue programmers, heavily resembles. In time, maybe it will even supplant it in reputation.