David Cronenberg’s Crash is a good, unnerving erotic thriller, held together by committed performances and precise filmmaking. Repetition and emotional distance can make the slow passages tiring, even when the actors keep us looking.
Crash is a good, deliberately difficult film about people who have found something sexual in cars, damage and danger. David Cronenberg adapts J.G. Ballard’s novel without offering much reassurance that he considers these desires stranger than any others. That calm is what makes the film troubling, and often absorbing. We recommend it to anyone prepared for an erotic thriller whose characters offer little warmth and whose pace gives us plenty of time to feel uncomfortable.
We were unsettled by the composure of the sex scenes. The encounters are obsessive and enclosed, yet the realistic treatment makes them difficult to dismiss as lurid fantasy. Cronenberg lets the sexual preoccupations occupy the screen without supplying an easy response on our behalf. There is time to notice our own discomfort, and nobody in the film seems inclined to help us out of it.
James Spader plays James Ballard with a reserve that suits the film, even when it keeps us at a distance. Holly Hunter’s Helen Remington feels firmer and more direct, while Elias Koteas gives Vaughan an intensity that holds our attention through the slow passages. Their differences matter in a film that risks treating everyone as a case to be examined. None of them tries to win our affection, and the performances are better for that restraint.
Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography makes the metal gleam, giving the cars a share of the sexual attention. Carol Spier’s production design reinforces the sense that these encounters happen in a world with little room for ordinary company. The enclosed settings are effective because they keep our attention on bodies and surfaces, with few comfortable distractions. The film’s realistic look makes the desires harder to set aside as something safely remote from everyday life.
Ronald Sanders’s editing sustains the languorous pace rather than trying to give every encounter the urgency of a conventional thriller. The scenes have time to become awkward, and the absence of much background noise makes that awkwardness harder to escape. Howard Shore’s music is especially valuable here, lending unease to a film whose people seldom seem alarmed by themselves. The score helps keep those long stretches tense, though it cannot make every repetition feel necessary.
The weakness is how little the mood changes. At 100 minutes, Crash still has stretches in which the sexual obsession feels established and the film appears content to establish it again. The emotional distance becomes tiring when another encounter gives us little new to consider. We can accept the lack of reassurance, but we would welcome more variation in how these people respond to one another.
As an erotic thriller, it offers few of the usual satisfactions: the sex is uneasy, and the slow pace discourages the expectation of a briskly solved problem. Its strength is the seriousness with which it attends to desires most films would use for a quick shock. Cronenberg does not need us to approve, though he does require us to keep looking. Choose it when an uncomfortable evening sounds worthwhile; company expecting a little escapism should have a say first.
