Cronenberg continues: “But you could say, well, Freud insisted on the reality of the human body at a time when people didn’t want to know about the body and covered it up with many layers of clothes.

“Freud talked about penises and vaginas and anuses and excrement and child abuse and incest. That connects this movie to my other movies. But also, in a way, psychoanalysts are like the group in Crash.

“People at the time viewed them as some weird Jewish cult and felt they were a subversive group living in the very structured society of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

Not interested in shooting his period psychodrama the Merchant Ivory way, with gleaming photography prettifying the past and placing a pane of glass between characters and viewers, Cronenberg shot with short and wide-angled lenses to place the audience close to his actors.