As part of the BFI IMAX’s ‘Love Stories’ season running throughout February, Crash is presented under the curatorial eye of Emerald Fennell, ahead of the release of her forthcoming Wuthering Heights. In her programme notes, Fennell makes a compelling case for love stories that rupture convention and render love freakish, gory, cruel, and strange. It’s a sharp and thoughtful framing, and one that initially made me hopeful for David Cronenberg’s notorious 1996 film Crash.

The usual critiques of Crash are well-worn: that it is immoral, disgusting and shameful. I don’t dislike the film for these reasons. Despite my negative response, I believe films like this should exist. I’m not averse to gory, sexually explicit or subversive cinema — quite the opposite. I’m drawn to work that stares down transgression and explores desire as irrational and dangerous, without offering easy moral positions.

But where films like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet feel like nightmares, Crash feels like a medical report. Nightmares ensnare us emotionally; they disturb us because they are felt in the body. 

Crash, by contrast, adopts a tone of clinical detachment, observing its characters as though under a microscope. This emotional flatness is often defended as the point of the film, but a point still needs to be interrogated, not merely asserted. Watching Crash is like eating a meal intentionally stripped of flavour: you can do it, but what’s the point? To prove that food — or cinema — can be dull and meaningless? Creating a sense of apathy can serve a film’s message, but art that strips itself of affect risks stripping itself of meaning altogether. Deadening the viewer does not automatically constitute insight. Either intentionally or ironically, the film reproduces the dull and hopeless condition it portends.

The film is often read as a vision of post-erotic desire: what happens when sex is emptied of intimacy and feeling, reduced to procedure and compulsion. I find this idea interesting in theory, but unconvincing in execution. Crash does not meaningfully explore how or why desire might arrive at this state; it simply declares that it has and it is not pretty. The characters feel less like the inevitable endpoint of modernity and more like people in acute psychological distress, yet the film wants us to view  this condition as universal. In theory, the psychology of desire, fear, repression and longing is one of the richest subjects art has ever grappled with. Here, interiority – inner life, motivation, feeling – is treated as obsolete. This doesn’t feel radical; it feels impoverished. Saying “what if nothing had meaning?” is not, in itself, an interesting premise — it simply collapses into nihilism.

The film’s metaphors linking the human body and technology are similarly thin. These ideas have been explored since the Industrial Revolution and rendered with far greater imagination by cinema itself — most notably in the German Expressionist films of the 1920s. Newer technology does not make them newly compelling. Here, the metaphors feel didactic rather than revelatory, as though stating an idea were enough to justify it.

Which brings me to Crash’s placement within the Wuthering Heights season — a decision I find confusing. I haven’t yet seen Fennell’s adaptation, but the novel is one of my all-time favourites, and its emotional register could not feel further from Crash. Wuthering Heights is feral and poetic, brimming with feeling; its sex and desire are primordial, rooted in landscape and time itself. Even at its most cruel and inhuman, it remains profoundly human. Its bleakness has weight because it is felt.As a companion piece, Crash feels fundamentally antithetical. If the pairing is intended to chart love or desire under pressure, then Crash offers not a troubling provocation but a hollow one. It’s like framing the statement “all art is meaningless” and hanging it in a gallery: you haven’t made a compelling argument, you’ve simply added another empty object to the room. Crash left me unmoved — drained of the very thing that makes obsession, desire, and cinema worth grappling with in the first place.

Emerald Fennell curates “Love Stories” is at BFI IMAX throughout February. For tickets and listing, please visit here. “Wuthering Heights” opens at BFI IMAX from 13 February. For tickets and listing, please visit here.