Body horror luminary David Cronenberg's films are all thematically related, but 1983's Videodrome and 1999's eXistenZ feel especially like a diptych. Videodrome is about the virtual reality created by televised mass media ("television is reality, and reality is less than television") and eXistenZ is about an immersive VR game that erodes the realness of the world in a more explicit way.
eXistenZ is the more traditionally entertaining movie, with an eerily vacant Jude Law at one point building a biological gun in one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, but Videodrome's more abstract take on virtual reality was arguably the more prescient one. Today, it's social media feeds and 20 second video clips that have the power to define our reality, while playing games with actual VR headsets remains a somewhat niche hobby despite Mark Zuckerberg's big dreams.
