The first work to announce David Cronenberg as a filmmaker destined for greatness, The Brood is at once unsettling and terrifying in ways that few movies are. It's full of rich ideas and ultra disturbing images, setting the stage for what we would come to expect from Cronenberg from here on out. There isn't a single light or happy moment in the picture; this is obviously the work of a man who holds some bitterness towards his younger years and has finally found a way to channel it. That The Brood is such a personal work is what essentially makes it so effective. This is a horror movie in which the filmmaker clearly wants you to feel every painful detail of what's trapped in his psyche.
The picture opens on a strange and uncomfortable note, as psychiatrist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) probes one of his patients in front of an audience. The two characters are surrounded in darkness, hence engulfing them in isolation. Raglan chastises the patient, calling him weak and comparing him to a girl since he is acting emotional and frail. This is the first of many moments where Cronenberg will examine the way the gender of the parent affects how they treat the gender of the child. The picture shifts then from this fake father/son (or daughter) moment to an actual father/daughter relationship between Frank (Art Hindle) and Candice (Cindy Hinds). They are at the institution because Frank's wife (and Cindy's mother) Nola (Samantha Eggar) is there being treated by Dr. Raglan.
Nola has mommy and daddy issues that still haven't gone away, and she won't be OK until she lets them out (literally). We get a sense from the scenes with Dr. Raglan that being a parent is a thankless role, as your children will blame you for everything that goes wrong in their lives. Nola seems to have a strong maternal instinct - according to her, mommies don't hurt their own children (Candice has bruises on her back that Frank believes Nola is responsible for) and if she was to, it would be because her parents did it to her. It's appropriate, of course, that Candice looks exactly like Nola, since we can already anticipate that she is going to grow into her mother. She's an unusually serious child, one who seems incapable of relaxing and having fun.
The movie's first truly striking visual occurs early in the picture when milk is spilled on the floor. It's a powerful visual due to the fact that we're witnessing a symbol of nurturing destroyed, an early indicator that there will not be any chance of redemption for the mother or child. Cronenberg has doomed them, and there is no turning back. The image is followed by the brutal murder of Nola's mother by a child in a hooded jacket (echoes of Don't Look Now?), an act that brings the woman's ex-husband back into town. The dangerous consequences of marriage are brought back into play once he arrives, devastated by the death of his ex-wife mostly due to his failures as a husband and a father (to make matters worse, he's become a drunk).
Nola's dad is the second to die at the hands of the hooded child. Fascinating, of course, that her parents both are murdered by rabid children. That things happen this way comes as no surprise, since they had to be punished for turning their daughter into a crazy person. Frank has a run in with the little monster, kills it, and sees its face, which is distorted and adult like. What Cronenberg is showing here is Nola's frustrations finally breaking free - she's found a way to put the traumas of her childhood to rest by giving birth to an inner child (a series of them, actually), their purpose being to take away any potential threats to her or her daughter.
Cronenberg sets up themes in The Brood that will become a staple in his career, the biggest being the dysfunctional nature of relationships between men and women (and parents and children). In his world, experiencing childhood is the equivalent to experiencing trauma, and it will inevitably lead to an adulthood of insanity. There's no god in Cronenberg's movies, because the ones who deserve to be saved cannot be and will not be. Bleak for sure, but Cronenberg is able to convey this belief so well it comes off as profound instead of simply depressing.
The movie is full of classic scenes that we will come to expect in most every Cronenberg picture, the signature one here of Nola opening her robe to reveal an inner child that is attached and growing out of her (the grotesque factor is raised once she opens the womb and begins to lick the baby). It's a startling moment in a movie full of hair raising moments, many of the best involving those freaky hooded kids (a scene where they go after Candice's teacher is a standout). Also powerful is a scene where photos of Candice's bruises are casually spread out across her stuffed animals. In the end, though, the scariest (and most tragic, as Cronenberg's movies often are) image in The Brood is the final one, a close up of Candice's silently traumatized face. This is the moment where everything in the picture has come full circle - any chance, if there ever was one, of this child having a normal life is lost forever.
The Brood is a complex and intriguing work, but it is not one of Cronenberg's masterpieces (of which there have been a handful). If the picture suffers from anything, it's too much exposition. Instead of giving the audience a real opportunity to hypothesize where the killer children came from, it gets spelled out to us through dialogue right before the conclusion. I don't know if this was a studio decision or his, but whatever the case, it takes the trust away from the audience and puts it back in the filmmaker's hands. It's a relatively small complaint ultimately, mainly because Cronenberg got away from it soon after. Revisiting The Brood at this point in his career is exciting and a bit distressing, the former because it reminds of how Cronenberg has the ability to get under one's skin, the latter because the auteur has detoured into movies more conventional and easy. Let's hope he still has movies like this up his sleeve. The future of filmmaking depends on it.
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