What immediately strikes me about this film is how none of the characters are obviously relatable. All the increasingly scarred and limping main characters are motivated by a shared sociopathic sexual fetish which shuts them away from the audience.

The tension between protagonist and antagonist lies in how far they’re willing to go for gratification. That’s the film’s sole grab-handle of character identification. But the movie makes you lurch for it, desperately, as it rolls over and over.

https://masto.nyc/@jmac/113357675139509617

I felt something more raw and personal while watching this, too. One is tempted to tie this into how we lost Pete, how cars and trucks and buses have mangled and murdered my family time and again, the smoldering revulsion that I will always carry for motor vehicles. But this movie isn’t interested in pedestrians; it says so itself, in so many words.

Rather, for all the movie’s scenes of desperate coupling amidst terrible violence and wreckage, it brings back an unforgettable night that my wife and I spent in each others’ arms: that singular Tuesday in early November of 2016. The clocks struck midnight as every needle on the New York Times digital front page twitched red, red, red. We held each other in the gathering dark, shocked, trembling.

The crashes kept coming after that, didn’t they? Blow after blow, ever-deeper bruising accumulating as one’s psyche is time and again thrown and mashed against the inside of one’s body. “It feels like the traffic on the streets has tripled since the accident, doesn’t it?” Yes, it did.

And we’re going to do get back into that car in two weeks. Back on the highway to see how much of that old feeling we’ll recapture, in the chase, in the moment of inevitable, uncontrolled climax as the wheels hit the median. And if the worst fails to happen, and the thrill of having it all crumple and burn around and into us is denied us?

Well then, maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one.