Crash

Technology and sexuality meet in head-on collision in David Cronenberg’s controversial adaptation of writer J.G. Ballard’s transgressive 1973 novel.

Spader stars as James Ballard, a film producer whose deviant sexual desires are awakened by a near fatal automobile accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Hunter).

Soon the pair, alongside Ballard’s wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), are drawn into an underground world of car crash fetishism presided over by renegade scientist Vaughan (Elias Koteas). Danger, sex and death become entwined as eroticism and technology join together in a disturbing, deadly union. Awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for originality, daring and audacity, Crash remains an incredibly subversive and confrontational piece of cinema—Cronenberg himself describes it as “a dangerous film”—now refurbished in a stunning new restoration. Ranked joint 225th in the 2022 Sight and Sound Great Films of All Time poll