Despite being relatively off-beat, Catherine and James Ballard's sex life has become somewhat dull. A head-on crash, in which James and his car kill Dr. Helen Remmington's husband, provides an unusual solution: both Helen and James develop through the most intense feelings of their lives a fetish for squealing tyres, shattering glass and buckling metal. They all join scientist Vaughan and his group of like-minded people who copy famous automobile accidents with no safety precautions. This seems to put a kick back into their sex lives, but it becomes inflationary and demands more and more radical measures...

• Many fans of director extraordinaire David Cronenberg are divided between those who prefer his films about humanity being unable to master its own technology, such as The Fly or Dead Ringers; and those who go for his journeys into mankind, like Naked Lunch or M. Butterfly. With Crash Cronenberg has created a work which is supposed to appeal to both groups, but actually creates a third, much smaller one.

The theme of James G. Ballard's 23-year-old novel, sexual stimulation through car accidents with all its consequences, including wrecks, scars, blood and death, will remain for most people after the experience of watching this film absurd, even if for some it does constitute an allegory of the stagnation and decline of Western culture.

Unfortunately, this film also suffers from its characters being completely inaccessible. Their lives are supposed to be hollow, and Deborah Unger as Catherine Ballard does master the vacant expression with bravado, but even this does not bring the people closer to us. We see what goes on on the screen, but we do not believe these people. When industrial films of crash-test dummies in smashed-up cars make them sitting in front of the box clutch each others' groins, no matter what sex they happen to be, you wonder what makes men (in this case the director) react with such attention to genetalia, and what might be the most effective treatment for this group trauma. By this point at the latest no more thought will be spared for any possible truth content.

The third big minus is this: even a film about sex and automobile accidents would have benefitted from either other scenes, or a more refined staging of the existing ones. Preferably both. All the sex and accidents seem like those liberally scattered in ordinary films, as fillers when the writer runs out of plot. Rather yawn-inducing when you have 98 minutes of this.

Out of respect for the ensemble and the director we should mention, as they did in Cannes, the courage, daring and originality of Crash. An unusual – even if failed – experiment is better than routine mass-production. Still, a cinema-goer should consider whether it is worth investing money for the pleasure of seeing a man shoving his dirty, smeary finger towards a woman's privates, or, more shudderingly, taking some woman just thrown out of her car and wandering around in shock.

• By the first few days after the films release in each area, wide reporting on its innovative contents and a rather lambasting verbal propaganda will result in sober takings. Political controversy, possibly resulting in delayed starts, may give better results in some countries.

Queer Watchlion

Deutsche Version

Soundtrack (German only)