You have to ask yourself what brought the person to this point.
Five years before David Cronenberg brought eXistenZ to the screen, fellow Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan had his breakthrough film with Exotica, which is set in and around the titular strip club, where lonely people go to salve their spiritual and psychic wounds. It's a complex story with a number of characters whose lives intersect in ways that aren't immediately apparent. This is because Egoyan withholds key pieces of information from us -- and from his characters -- patiently doling them out, allowing us -- and them -- to discover the whole truth in our own time. That this isn't frustrating for the audience has a lot to do with Egoyan's command of the milieu and the compelling characters he's chosen to occupy it.
Those characters include Bruce Greenwood's revenue official, who is brought in to audit the books of pet shop owner Don McKellar, who is suspected of smuggling by customs, Elias Koteas's strip club DJ, who delights in introducing exotic dancer Mia Kirshner, whose specialty is dressing like a schoolgirl, Arsinée Khanjian's pregnant club owner, who is disturbed by the way Koteas announces her, and Sarah Polley as Greenwood's babysitter, who doesn't seem to have a baby to sit. Oh, did I mention that Greenwood frequents Exotica, where he enacts a semi-nightly ritual with Kirchner, which somehow relates to his babysitting ritual with Polley? Or that McKellar inherited his pet shop (which is lined with scummy fish tanks) from his father and Khanjian inherited her strip club (which has an aquarium-type feel) from her mother? I could mention more parallels, but to do so would give away some of the film's more powerful revelations -- and no doubt about it, this film packs an emotional wallop.
While Exotica's "everybody's connected" theme may seem old hat now, back in 1994 it wasn't yet the standard device for every ensemble drama looking to nab some little gold statuettes at Oscar time. (I'm looking at you, Crash. No, not the Cronenberg film about people who have sex after getting into car accidents. I mean the other one that inexplicably beat out Brokeback Mountain for Best Film of 2005.) It also paved the way for Egoyan's next film, an adaptation of Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter, which carried over several key cast members, plus Egoyan regulars David Hemblen and Maury Chaykin, who both had small parts in this film. (Chaykin's is an uncredited walk-on, but I'm sure he didn't mind that considering he plays one of Exotica's patrons.) The Sweet Hereafter was the first Egoyan film I ever saw and it was the one that convinced me to seek out all the others. I have yet to regret doing so.