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Crash

Film producer James Ballard and his wife, Catherine, are in an open marriage. The couple engages in various trysts, using the intimate details of their extramarital encounters to fuel their own sexual relations. Catherine recounts a sexual encounter she had that day with a stranger in a prop plane hangar, but she was left unsatisfied. When James responds that he did not achieve satisfaction during his own encounter with a coworker due to an interruption by a film crew member, Catherine replies, "Maybe the next one."

One night, while driving home from work, James's car collides head-on with another, killing its male passenger. While trapped in the fused wreckage, Dr. Helen Remington, the driver and the dead passenger's wife, exposes a breast to James as she removes the shoulder harness of her seatbelt.

During his recovery, James meets Helen again and also encounters Robert Vaughan, who shows a keen interest in the brace holding James's shattered leg together. After departing the hospital, Helen and James begin an affair, driven primarily by their shared experience of the car crash. They attend one of Vaughan's cult-like performance pieces, where he meticulously recreates the car crash that killed James Dean using replica cars and stunt drivers. When Department of Transport officials break up the event, James flees with Helen and Vaughan.

James soon becomes one of Vaughan's followers, who fetishize car crashes, obsessively watch car safety test videos, photograph traffic collisions, and recount the deaths of famous people in road accidents. Catherine, who has noticed Vaughan following her in his car on several occasions, begins to fantasize about him and James having sex. Although Vaughan initially claims that he is interested in the "reshaping of the human body by modern technology," his true project is living out the philosophy that the car crash is a "benevolent psychopathology that beckons toward us."

James drives Vaughan's Lincoln convertible around the city while Vaughan picks up a prostitute and has sex with her in the back seat. James and Catherine have sex while Catherine fantasises about James and Vaughan having sex. Shortly after, James invites Catherine on one of his and Vaughan's drives. They see police search Vaughan's convertible in connection with a pedestrian hit-and-run, leaving Vaughan distressed. On an interstate, they come across a car wreck involving Colin Seagrave, a member of the group who had been planning to authentically recreate the car accident that killed Jayne Mansfield with Vaughan. Amongst the wreckage, the three see Colin's bloodied corpse, dressed in a blonde wig and a dress to resemble Mansfield. Vaughan photographs the scene as they pass by. James notices some unexplained blood on the fender and drives them through a car wash while Vaughan and Catherine have sex in the back seat. Back home, Catherine lies in bed with visible, though superficial, wounds from Vaughan's touch, crying while James touches her.

James subsequently has a tryst with Gabrielle, another member of the group, whose legs are clad in restrictive steel braces and who has a vulva -like scar on the back of one of her thighs from a crash injury. He tears her fishnet stockings open and penetrates her scar. Later, Vaughan invites James to visit a tattooist, who inks car emblems on Vaughan's body. Afterward, James and Vaughan have sex in Vaughan's car.

When Vaughan rams his car into Catherine's while it is unattended, he and James aggressively pursue each other. On an overpass, Vaughan intentionally crashes his car, landing on a passenger bus below and killing himself. After Vaughan's death, Gabrielle and Helen visit a junkyard, kissing and affectionately embracing while lying in the wreck of Vaughan's car.

Later, James and Catherine perform a similar stunt, with James pursuing her at high speed on a freeway. Catherine unbuckles her seatbelt as she sees James approaching, and he rams into the back of her car, causing it to topple down into a grassy median. James exits his car and approaches Catherine's, which has flipped upside down. Catherine lies partly under the car, apparently only superficially injured. When James asks if she is okay, she tells him she is not hurt. As the couple kisses and begins to have sex partly underneath the wrecked vehicle, James whispers to a crying Catherine, "Maybe the next one."