DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: David Cronenberg
PRODUCTION CO: Alliance Communications Corporation, Recorded Picture Company
SCREENPLAY: David Cronenberg, based on the novel by J G Ballard
PHOTOGRAPHY: Peter Suschitzky
EDITOR: Roland Sanders
MUSIC: Howard Shore
WITH: James Spader (James Ballard), Holly Hunter (Dr Helen Remington), Elias Koteas (Dr Robert Vaughan), Deborah Kara Unger (Catherine Ballard), Rosanna Arquette (Gabrielle), Peter MacNeill (Colin Seagrave) 

​​FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEWS

“For this icily erotic fusion of flesh and machine, David Cronenberg adapted JG 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 (James Spader), and an enigmatic doctor, Helen (Holly Hunter), brings them, along with James’s wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger, in a sublimely detached performance), 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 – where it won a Special Jury Prize ‘for originality, for daring, and for audacity’ – 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.”

— Criterion

“Still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism”

– Guardian

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Wellington     
Monday, 12 June, 6.15pm

​Auckland  
Monday, 19 June, 6.15pm

Whanganui  
Monday, 17 July, 7.00pm

​Dunedin  
Wednesday, 04 October, 7.30pm

​Canterbury  
Monday, 16 October, 7.00pm

CULT & CLASSICS selection >>