Crash is a controversial screen interpretation of J.G. Ballard's (Empire of the Sun) 1972 cult novel about a group of individuals obsessed with techno-sex.
James (James Spader), a television commercial producer, and his wife Catherine (Deborah Unger) are a jaded couple who get their kicks out of sexual tricks with strangers. After he is involved in a car accident which results in the death of another man, James is drawn into a sexual relationship with Helen (Holly Hunter), the wife of the victim. She introduces him to Vaughn (Elias Koteas), a renegade scientist who heads a car crash cult. Fascinated with what he calls "the reshaping of the human body by modern technology," this thrill seeker is obsessed with the re-enactment of celebrity auto crashes, such as those of James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. Vaughn also believes that car crash survivors must embrace the incident as a "fertilizing event" leading to a reinterpretation of sex and death.
Writer and director David Cronenberg (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch) has made a disturbing film about the tendency of modern people to eroticize danger and to seek transcendence in detached sex animated by fetishes.
The film had its premiere at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Prize "for originality, for daring and for audacity." Many will find Crash to be morally reprehensible and will avoid it like the plague.
For the adventuresome filmgoer this provocative work explores the dynamics of aberrant sexual behavior and the demons which accompany the 20th century idolization of the car as the ultimate symbol of freedom and as a human appendage.