Critics reviews

It ranks up there as one of the Canadian master's most hypnotic exercises in pure style, its point of view established through disquieting sound design..., creepily clinical close-ups of seat-belt sashes, and eerily flat line deliveries... Cronenberg's movies develop tension through an internal conflict between the visceral and the clinical; this one tips all the way into the former, creating an alienating quasi-thriller that isn't quite like any other movie around.

Every human eventually finds themselves at a crossroads with regard to their sexual identity, down which lies a host of dizzying options. Crash drives headlong towards the unknown, and each blown red light signifies the destruction of falsely and flimsily erected boundaries. If you're still in your chair, then you're in Cronenberg's passenger seat.

...This is why I think the movie, like the book, is a masterpiece. No other film has broached this enormous subject, that of how the modern life we live is controlled by the privilege of independent transport, shaped by the mechanical/technological extensions of the car, and wounded by the holocaust of damage this cultural ascension has produced.

In both novel and film form, Crash takes a non-moral and non-celebratory approach (though the tableauxs are fantastic) to its subject matter, creating an alternative perception of the physical world that is as beautiful as its is horrific. And that amalgamation is, unlike many movies and, true to Cronenberg, disturbingly, unnervingly sexy. And very human.

Almost as pared down and purified as late Bresson, Cronenberg's Crash focuses on half a dozen individuals who aren't so much characters as separate versions, aspects, or stages of the same character; all are car-crash veterans and most have sex with most of the others.

A masterpiece of the highest order, equal in stature to The Fly (1986) in Cronenberg's brilliant and ever evolving career... Much of its texture and detail emphasises a constant, niggling, inescapable sensation of erotic stimulation experienced by all the characters – few films have given such palpable, insistent force to the turned-on gaze, the apprehension of another person's body nearby, the moment when someone's hand slides between one's legs ...