The only thing you need to know about this film is that it is relentlessly David Cronenberg, drawing more on his own body of work than J.G. Ballards.
 James Ballard is a film producer, Catherine Ballard  takes flying lessons. They have sex together, they have sex with other people. They tell each other of their sexual conquests while they are having sex. One day he is involved in a fatal car accident where a man is killed outright.  The man's wife survives and introduces James Ballard to a world beyond his simply defined open marriage into sexual fetish and deviation involving cars,  car crashes and car crash victims. His wife becomes involved too, they now have a new form of pleasure to explore.
 The film tries to remain aesthetically removed from the accepted emotional aspects of the story, it becomes glorious and gratifying to die or become scarred for life, and this serves to reiterate the consuming obsessions of the protagonists, forever fucking in an inevitable, indeed desired, spiral of degradation. While wounds, crushed metal and cold steel against flesh are sexualised, the frequent couplings between the Ballards in their matrimonial bed are not.
As auto-erotic propaganda the film works magnificently, we are never allowed more than a fleeting glimpse of anyone who is not obsessed with mecha-sex. Vaughan (Elias Koteas), sadistic organiser of celebrity death crash recreations; Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) a calliper wearing fetishist; Colin Seagrave (Peter MacNeil) desperately wanting to recreate Jayne Mansfield's death crash, complete with exploding mammaries and dead dog. And so on. When the gang come across a genuine pile up their fixation is shown as macabre naiveté, sliding their way through the carnage, taking photos of themselves with the wrecks. The look in their faces is of wonder, even the cause of the pile up does not detract from their pleasure.
 If there is any meaning, it comes at the point where Catherine's car had been crashed into while garaged. It was a small dent, a mere trifle compared to the scale of accidents previously encountered. She had not been in the car at the time (and therefore had not derived any pleasure from it), but she reacted the way most of us would about a dent in our cars; in our society we have made cars a reflection and extension of our personalities (road rage confirms this), the auto-erotica of the film merely takes that concept one step further.
 Symbols abound throughout the film - the complex metalwork that puts James Ballards leg back together, gleaming, shiny and sexy reflects the symbiosis between man and machine. Their prominent wedding rings are an extension of this and yet a reminder of traditional values, their love for each other is never questioned.
 'Crash' gives a different perspective to the whole car-crash-sex genre; Goddard used elements of this for political purposes in 'Weekend' and 'Pierrot le Fou', Shinya Tsukamoto's 'Tetsuo' emphasises the body-machine and Peter Weirs 'Cars That Ate Paris' uses it as an attack on consumer capitalism. Only Cronenberg sees it as internally liberating.
  Stylistically the film harks back to the 1970's of Cronenberg's 'Rabid' and 'Shivers'. This is not criticism. If there is any criticism over its content it is in the lack of explicit male nudity, presenting an unbalanced feel to the proceedings that detracts from the overall liberal nature of the work. It is unusual in that there is not a conventional narrative structure, the film doesn't fit into a niche, isn't comfortable and doesn't have a nice, neat resolution.
 This is one of the most important films of the decade, it will infuriate (not least those after a cheap thrill) and provoke much argument. It had to be made, and has to be seen.