BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Crash is an astonishing film -- ''original'' and ''audacious,'' as the Cannes Film Festival jury said in presenting it with a special award last year.

It may be the best movie you'll never want to see.

Director David Cronenberg's vision of people obsessed with auto accidents as erotic events stirred a huge controversy at Cannes. It deserves the award, and the controversy. Daring and revolting, frightening and hypnotic, it burrows into the darkest depths of modern, urban psychosis.

MOVIE REVIEW Crash **** (NC-17; numerous explicit sex scenes, accident gore, graphic language) James Spader and Holly Hunter (above) Elias Koteas, Deborah Unger, Rosanna Arquette. 100 minutes. At National Amusements, Danbarry Middletown, Princess Oxford.

The film presents us with a handsome, bored, promiscuous couple, James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Unger).

One night, James has an accident that kills the husband of Helen (Holly Hunter) and leads him into a small circle of ''partners in psychopathology,'' as described by their leader Vaughan (Elias Koteas). They re-create fatal car accidents in meticulous detail, a process that unleashes extreme sexual appetites.

The story is an allegory more than a narrative, unconventional in form as much as content, like a cross between ancient ritual and science fiction. The characters are not people we know, and the movie doesn't ask us to care about them in the usual way.

They are symbols. They are ghosts. Crash dares us to recognize them, to recognize our nightmare versions of ourselves in them.

The film also risks driving us away with its fixation on death, eroticized machinery, diseased and wounded flesh, scars and dangerous sex.

For all the intensity of its multi-sexual couplings -- and there's not a missionary position in the bunch -- Crash couldn't be further removed from pornography. Pornography by its nature is superficial, juvenile, titillating. Here it is simultaneously horrifying and hypnotic -- like a car wreck.

The movie uses sex to plumb psychological depths most of us would rather leave untouched. It invites hysteria and approbation. It's not a ''likable'' film in any regular sense. Its concerns are disquieting and creepy, and subversive on a cosmic scale. It takes bravery to make a movie like this, and bravery to watch it.

Crash is so unlike any other film that I was reluctant to give it a star rating at all. It is an extraordinary, difficult work from an extraordinary, difficult artist. It makes demands on its audience that many will find intolerable.

Think hard before you see it. Once you experience this film, you won't forget it.