'Crash' was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for its audacity, daring and originality. Based on J.G. Ballard's novel, the film is a complex work in which Cronenberg depicts, with shocking beauty, a world in which humans align their minds, bodies and sexuality to the technology of cars. Set in a bleak, passionless world of multi-lane freeways, Crash presents the story of James Ballard and his wife Catherine, whose search for authentic experience leads them into a relationship with a renegade scientist who seeks sexual release by crashing into cars on the freeway. In translating the world of J.G Ballard's 'Crash' into the language of the screen, Cronenberg has fashioned a script which is rigorous and taut, but suffused with emotional intensity and a deep feeling for human fraility and decay.

Naomi and Nathan thrive on the yellow journalism of the social-media age. They are nomadic freelancers in pursuit of sensation and depravity. Naomi becomes engrossed about Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy, Marxist philosophers and sexual libertines. Célestine has been found dead and mutilated in her Paris apartment; police suspect Aristide of killing her and consuming parts of her body. Nathan, meanwhile, is in Budapest photographing the controversial work of an unlicensed surgeon. After sleeping with one of Molnár's patients, Nathan contracts a rare STD called Roiphe's. Their parallel narratives become entwined with 3-D printing, North Korea, the Cannes Film Festival and, in an incredible number of varieties, sex.