Prestige Sleaze: Crash
June 9 - 24, 2024
David Cronenberg's adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s future-shock novel brings a disaffected commercial producer and an enigmatic doctor together after a traffic collision. This event plunges them into a world of sadomasochistic car-crash fetishists, blurring the lines between flesh and machine.
For this icily erotic fusion of flesh and machine, David Cronenberg adapted J. G. Ballard’s future-shock novel of the 1970s into one of the most singular and provocative films of the 1990s. A traffic collision involving a disaffected commercial producer, James, and an enigmatic doctor, Helen, brings them, along with James’s wife, Catherine, together in a crucible of blood and broken glass—and it’s not long before they are all initiated into a kinky, death-obsessed underworld of sadomasochistic car-crash fetishists for whom twisted metal and scar tissue are the ultimate turn-ons. Controversial from the moment it premiered at Cannes, Crash has since taken its place as a key text of late-twentieth-century cinema, a disturbingly seductive treatise on the relationships between humanity and technology, sex and violence, that is as unsettling as it is mesmerizing.
- Director: David Cronenberg
- Principal Cast: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Rosanna Arquette
- Country: United Kingdom, USA, Canada
- Year: 1996
- Running Time: 100 min.
- Producer: David Cronenberg
- Screenplay: David Cronenberg
- Cinematographers: Peter Suschitzky
- Editors: Ronald Sanders
- Music: Howard Shore
- Filmography: The Fly (1986) Videodrome (1983) Scanners (1981)
- Language: English, Swedish