Film Review — The Brood (1979)
★★★★☆
A man investigates his troubled ex-wife’s unusual therapy sessions that may or may not be connected to several brutal murders.
Born out of a highly acrimonious divorce, it won’t take a psychiatrist to work out what was going through David Cronenberg’s mind in this cult horror classic with a deeply personal subtext.
Like many of his features, The Brood requires patience as Cronenberg unravels the mystery of a broken family before slowly dialling up the otherworldly elements; mysterious assailants committing bloody atrocities, and the grisly body horror chiefly responsible for the Canadian filmmaker’s legendary reputation as the best of the gross.
A palpable feeling of bitterness runs through the picture, represented in Art Hindle’s Frank and Samantha Eggar’s Nola — the seldom-seen-together couple whose fractured relationship brings the director’s raw personal emotions to the surface. Forget monstrous trauma babies; this is the real horror on show.
Complaints regarding its problematic depiction of a broken and mad matriarch are probably justified, but there are few heroes in these kinds of stories, a lesson painfully and messily revealed by the horror master’s own introspection.
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