The Brood

What was, until The Shrouds (2024), David Cronenberg’s most overtly autobiographical film, The Brood (1979) chronicles the bitter termination of the marriage of Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar) and the accompanying battle over custody of their young daughter. The acrimony is exacerbated by Nola’s involvement in an immersive, very post-hippie self-betterment program administered by the overbearingly paternal, flamboyantly pretentious Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), whose radical technique for catalyzing self-actualization is on full display in the film’s arresting opening scene: we find Raglan and one of his patients sitting face-to-face on a small stage before an audience—they’re literally making theater out of therapy. During these sessions, Raglan poses as a sort of medium, channeling the voice of the antagonist in a given narrative, typically a family member the patient regards as culpable in their trauma.

The brilliantly cast Reed exudes a buffoonish arrogance, using recursive intimidation, sustained eye contact, and provocative taunts to break a patient’s resistance. The patient will also break out in bizarre skin manifestations—new flesh that, in Nola’s case, will rapidly mature into the drone-like emissaries of the film’s title, the offspring of her rage.

Breaking up is hard to do. The Brood was inspired by a phone call from Cronenberg’s ex-wife announcing that she was going to California to join what was, in Cronenberg’s estimation, quite obviously a cult, prompting him to, in his own half-joking words, kidnap their daughter. Central to the Canadian auteur’s genius is his ability to render psychic states as material melodrama—he makes the internal external—so the film’s evil guru actively encourages over-identification with the therapist. Raglan messes not just with Nola’s mind but also her reproductive system, repurposing her womb as a garden of murderous children. It’s a beautifully preposterous conceit, replete with Cronenberg’s trademark subcultures and neologisms—Raglan’s program is dubbed “psychoplasmics”—and the first work in his mature phase as a horror/sci-fi iconoclast.

There are some unusually on-the-nose references in The Brood to Psycho and Don’t Look Now, but from there on, Cronenberg’s approach to storytelling became only stranger and more sui generis. The Brood’s release year coincided with that of Kramer vs. Kramer, and I always appreciated the fact that Cronenberg promoted his film as the by far more realistic depiction of divorce and custody negotiations.