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Synopsis: Frank and Nola Carweth are undergoing a messy divorce. They are battling over the custody of their daughter, Candice, and Nola is in therapy with Dr. Raglan, a psychotherapist with a radical new technique called "Psychoplasmics." Ragland's technique encourages the patient to physically manifest their dysphasias through their bodies. Meanwhile, people close to Nola--her father and mother, their daughter's schoolteacher--are being murdered in gruesome fashion by dwarf-like figures. As Frank attempts to unravel the mystery, he discovers that "Psychoplasmic" therapy leads to bizarre mutations. Nola, it seems, is Raglan's star pupil. She is literally producing "Children of Rage," small clones that look like grotesque versions of her own daughter, that go forth and expiate her own id. Armed with this knowledge,Frank confronts Nola in Raglan's lair, during which she births a new clone from her grotesque external birth sac. Frank strangles Nola and rescues their daughter from the clones. As they drive away, Candice scratches at her arm, where Psychoplasmic mutations are taking hold....

The Ick Factor: David Cronenberg has made some vivid and repulsive movies. None are infused with nastier imagery than The Brood. The birth scene near the end of this film is simultaneously the most repulsive and most beautiful thing Cronenberg has ever filmed, as Samantha Eggar bites open the tumorous birth sac that sprouts from her abdomen and licks the amniotic gore from her newborn clone. The various murder sequences are carefully calculated to recall the worst childhood fears. The scene where Nola's father falls on a bed and the camera shows a clawed hand emerge from underneath it is the primal stuff of nightmares.

Controlled Chaos: Cronenberg's first two films--Shivers and Rabid--are the work of a film making scientist who sets up the conditions of his cinematic experiments and lets the chips fall where they may. Those two films spin off loads of ideas, but they are out of control. They reflect the sensibilities of the man who set the conditions--Cronenberg, that is--and some of the formal particulars are fairly uniform, but they spin far out of Cronenberg's ability to contain them. The Brood is different. It is minutely controlled for maximum effect. Part of this is because the director has abandoned his apocalyptic, post-Night of the Living Dead approach to his material. The Brood is almost purely personal. Cronenberg has described this as his divorce film, as a "more realistic" version of Kramer vs. Kramer. As such, it is certainly the angriest of his early films. But his clinical dispassion for his material makes it among his coldest and most calculated films, too. The violence in the film has the perverse effect of humanizing it. Interestingly, The Brood is also one of Cronenberg's more playful films. The director rarely includes any kind of reflexive content at all and almost never acknowledges the broader genre to which his films belong, but here he does it explicitly by having Candice Carweth attend Krell Elementary School. The implication is that The Brood is a fun-house reflection of Forbidden Planet and that Nola's clones are actually Monsters from the Id.

Performances: Both Oliver Reed as Raglan and Samantha Eggar as Nola give flamboyant performances in The Brood. Reed, in particular, has the arrogance that all mad scientists SHOULD have. Eggar has an effective twinkle of madness in her eyes throughout. Art Hindle, on the other hand, is a cipher. His Frank Carweth is a blank page on which the rest of the film imprints itself. I used to think that this was the result of having a limited actor in the role, but I now suspect that part of this is intentional on Cronenberg's part. Perhaps he realized that he needed a center for his movie that was palpably normal. Cronenberg has subsequently demonstrated that he is a capable director of actors, so this hypothesis doesn't seem as outlandish as it once might have seemed.

Subtext: Ah...it's a David Cronenberg movie. From the get go, Cronenberg has had an instantly recognizable set of themes and ideas. His films are all pinned to the mind/body conflict and laced with psychic invasion, disease and contagion, mutation, unnatural reproduction, and weird sex. The landscapes against which Cronenberg places these themes are invariably chilly postmodernist spaces. The Brood is a model of Cronenberg's aesthetic, showcasing his themes in a ferociously intelligent framework. The Brood is without question the best of Cronenberg's early films, distilling his themes down to a brutally sharp point and thrusting it home.

***Cronenberg's fictional Dr. Raglan is the author of a book called The Shape Of Rage. This later became the title of a book about Cronenberg's cinema. This book eventually showed up on film in Chris Wallas's sequel to The Fly.