Crash
“Maybe the next time, darling. Maybe the next time.”
Morality doesn’t really exist in Crash. Cronenberg refuses to judge anyone or guide your reaction, he just presents this world and leaves you alone with it.
What really struck me is how little empathy the film offers. We get no real backstories, no emotional context — just people defined by their accidents and their shared attraction to them. Even death is treated with this eerie emotional flatness. Intimacy exists, but connection doesn’t. It’s closeness without empathy, touch without warmth, and the whole thing feels deeply lonely.
On a broader level, it reads as a bleak comment on modern numbness — how intensity starts to replace intimacy when nothing else cuts through. The repetition can feel numbing, but that emotional distance feels intentional. Cronenberg may genuinely have one of the most fascinating minds to come out of Canada.