For a filmmaker who in Videodrome and Dead Ringers so elegantly broached the unspeakable, Cronenberg has here made a picture that is all surface.
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What are critics saying?
San Francisco Examiner by Barbara Shulgasser
Cronenberg has said that he made the film to find out why he was making it. You may watch it for the same reason.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
David Cronenberg's movie is a chilly meditation on this theme, carrying some cinematic interest but surprisingly dull given the story's outrageous subject.
Washington Post by Desson Thomson
Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.
San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann
I'm not quite sure what David Cronenberg is trying to say in Crash, but whatever it is, he deserves a lot of credit for having the nerve to put it on screen and face the consequences.
The New York Times by Elvis Mitchell
The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination.
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Crash has a couple of concepts which are, admittedly, fascinating and original, but not a whole lot more.
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Compared with the novel, the movie might seem predictable. But compared with other movies, it stands alone.
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result.
A marked departure from Cronenberg’s other films in form, but not in theme, Crash provides a fantastically nasty look at the erotic life of a group of bisexual car crash fetishists. Following the hyperreal melding of man and television in Videodrome, Crash details a new remapping of the flesh, one that reconfigures the erogenous zones of the human body into a mix of metal, wires, and wounds. Giving us some of the most memorable performances in Cronenberg’s filmography, Hunter and Spader are wonderfully mechanical and off-putting, effectively cementing these transformations into man-woman-machines through stilted dirty talk and alien displays of obsession. A criminally underrated film and honestly…my controversial top movie pick for Pride month every year (seriously)!