Crash

Like many other films, CRASH is so upsetting that second viewings are hard to come by. Its counterparts of this syndrome would be Darren Aronofsky's REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, or Lars Von Trier's ANTICHRIST. These films each have something within them that is either so revealing of raw humanness that to re-see such harrowing things would file under masochism. But, then again, many American films exhibit how masochistic the audience is. Any horror film, where an audience becomes frightened, is an act of semi-masochism. Tension is too. But CRASH is a special case because it varies from the expected horrors within a film. CRASH is, at its heart, a fantasy, but one that parades itself as existing within the real world. It tells of a man (James Spader) who crashes his car head-on into an oncoming vehicle. The man in the car (who is presumed to have not been wearing a seatbelt) flies out and dies immediately, but the woman (Holly Hunter) survives, and as she escapes the car, her breast pops out which Spader's character looks at in surprised pleasure. Later, the two are at the hospital. Scars and scabs adorn their bodies, and Spader's character still gets turned on by his predicament, screwing his wife, and later the woman whose husband died in the crash. He later discovers more people who share his fetish: car crashes, which turn him on sexually. He gets involved with all of these people because of the love of cars, and that the story sometimes doesn't make sense only supports the idea of sexual compulsion. Many who hate this film, I fear, would take it's ideas of cars turn people on seriously. But this is merely a substitute for any number of odd turn on's and its creepiness only serves to support how creepy some turn on's are, and what they lead to. CRASH is a brilliant film, although it is occasionally upsetting. It's a porno, but instead of naughty nurses entering as foreplay, the car crashes are the foreplay.
Crash: ★★★★