Starring James Spader. Rated 18A.

In his dry video intro to the icily gorgeous new 4K restoration of Crash, director David Cronenberg sits in his Tesla, recalling the film being dubbed “pornographic” and “filthy” on its 1996 debut at Cannes.

The body-horror auteur then wonders what we’ll think of his ode to auto-eroticism in 2020.

On one hand, Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s book about people who get off on car crashes serves as a stark reminder of how few risks films take today. Back in the 1990s, Ted Turner and Britain’s Daily Mail ran panicked campaigns to ban the movie. Fast-forward to 2020, and it’s almost impossible to imagine Crash getting made, with its dead-eyed urbanites rutting in the back seats of crumpled cars and vixens in S&M-style leg braces and body casts.

The controversy and censorship that surrounded the film 24 years ago also made it feel darker and more forbidden. But a fresh view reveals Crash, like Videodrome and so much else in Cronenberg’s oeuvre, as more of a hearse-black satire. Today, it’s funny to watch the mutual masturbation scene that erupts over a crash-test video. Stuntmen re-enacting James Dean’s car-crash death, with Elias Koteas narrating at the mike, is over-the-top absurd.

Everybody commits to the aloof tone and sexual risks here, most notably a boyishly creepy James Spader. His James Ballard is in an open marriage with distant Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger), as they try unsuccessfully to titillate each other with stories of their affairs.

It’s not till a highway accident—a man torpedoing through his windshield and into his front seat—that Ballard finally starts to feel something. Holly Hunter, in her severe bob, structured suits, and leather driving gloves, introduces him to the twisted, scar-ridden subculture that gets off on car crashes.

From here, the story repeats and loops, with endless  encounters as the characters search for sexual satisfaction that might only be fulfilled with death.

The new restoration heightens the clinical remove of Cronenberg’s direction and the twilight-hued atmosphere of Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography, his camera caressing dented fenders and steam-spewing hoods in the same voyeuristic thrall that grips its depictions of the screws piercing the skin of Ballard’s shattered leg.

Toronto’s apartment towers and overpasses have never looked colder. Howard Shore’s score, too, ages well, with its driving, steel-string rhythms.

The film is still eerily prescient about the way technology numbs us. Some of Crash’s near-surgical aesthetic—check out those metallic opening credits!—and harder-edged sex feel more stuck in the ’90s. But the fetishized car culture? It’s still very much with us, even when it takes the form of an all-electric Tesla.