You can always count on David Cronenberg to turn therapy into a blood sport. In The Brood, he skips the foreplay and dives headfirst into his own trauma-soaked psyche, dragging us with him like unwilling participants in a group counseling session sponsored by Satan and Canadian tax credits. This isn’t just body horror—it’s custody horror, a shrieking domestic breakdown with scalpels for fingernails and a performance by Oliver Reed so wonderfully pompous, you can practically smell the cigar smoke through the screen.
Released in 1979, The Brood is widely considered Cronenberg’s first “personal” film—which is director code for “I wrote this during my divorce, and now everyone must suffer.” And suffer they do. The movie is a venomous cocktail of psychoanalysis, parental grief, and flesh-melting birth metaphors, dressed up in the beige wallpaper and musty flannel of late-’70s Canada. It’s also uneven as hell—brilliant in spots, baffling in others, and absolutely unfit for any family movie night unless your last name ends in Manson.
The premise is deceptively simple: Frank Carveth (Art Hindle, in full ‘I-haven’t-slept-in-a-month’ mode) is trying to protect his daughter Candice from his estranged wife, Nola (Samantha Eggar), who’s holed up in a remote psychiatric institute run by the enigmatic Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed, chewing the scenery like it’s made of whiskey-soaked leather). Raglan practices something called “psychoplasmics,” which involves his patients expressing trauma so deeply that it manifests physically—like hives, tumors, or, in Nola’s case, a uterus in the wrong zipcode.
As Frank tries to gain custody of Candice, people around him start dying in grisly, hammer-to-the-face fashion. The killers? Deformed, childlike figures in snowsuits who scuttle around like deranged Oompa Loompas and club people to death with toy mallets. It’s hard not to laugh the first time one of them shows up, because they look like evil Cabbage Patch dolls on bath salts. But when they start killing kindergartners and old ladies with surgical precision, the chuckles curdle.
Eventually, we discover the big twist (spoilers ahead, if you haven’t been born in the last four decades): these pint-sized murderers are the physical offspring of Nola’s repressed rage. Through psychoplasmics, she births her fury into these mute little monsters—external womb, no father, no umbilical cord, just rage and corduroy. She literally pukes up her emotions in the form of living, breathing, hammer-wielding kids. It’s a metaphor so on-the-nose, you can see the knuckle marks.
And yet, for all its audacity, The Brood is… just okay.
Let’s start with the good: the atmosphere. Cronenberg captures a kind of cold, suburban dread that few filmmakers ever master. The snow-covered streets, the sterile interiors, the awkward silences—it’s all dripping with tension. The cinematography is competent but subdued, reinforcing the clinical mood. You feel trapped in this world, like you’re stuck in a therapy session that’s gone wildly off-script but you can’t leave because they’ve locked the door and your coat’s in the other room.
Samantha Eggar is the movie’s secret weapon. As Nola, she’s unsettling even before the final reveal. Her voice trembles like it’s been dipped in arsenic, and when she finally unveils her “brood”—complete with lumpy back, slick uterus sack, and maternal cooing over a blood-covered fetus—it’s both absurd and disturbing. Eggar delivers the line “I’m proud of my babies” with the same tone one might use to describe winning a PTA bake-off, and that’s when you know you’re in deep Cronenberg territory.
Oliver Reed, as Dr. Raglan, gives a performance that’s either brilliantly subtle or completely sedated. He looks like a man who believes deeply in the power of psychotherapy but also keeps a knife under his pillow just in case the dreams start talking back. Reed brings a kind of smug gravitas to the role, but it’s never clear whether Raglan is a visionary or a con artist. Probably both. Either way, he ends up in a hilariously undignified position during the climax, cowering in a hallway, about to get whacked by a dwarf goblin birthed from a woman’s spleen. It’s not his best look.
The child actor playing Candice, meanwhile, spends most of the movie looking vaguely traumatized—which, to be fair, is accurate. Her parents are insane, her therapist looks like he drinks cologne, and her babysitter just got beaten to death by what looked like a homicidal Cabbage Patch Kid in ski gear. If she didn’t grow up to become a goth tattoo artist or a chainsaw sculptor, I’ll eat my own emotions (hopefully not via psychoplasmics).
But despite all the wonderfully unhinged elements, The Brood doesn’t always stick the landing. The pacing is sluggish. There are stretches of exposition so dry they could be used as kindling. Frank, our supposed protagonist, is about as engaging as a snow shovel. He spends most of the movie with his jaw clenched, delivering lines like a man ordering soup through a court order. You don’t root for him so much as tolerate him while waiting for the next monster-child to drop in like a pipe wrench from hell.
And while the third act is bonkers in the best way—Nola caressing her placenta like it’s a newborn and licking blood off her fingers like she’s sampling jam—it also feels weirdly abrupt. The film wants to be both cathartic and nihilistic, but it doesn’t quite commit to either. Nola dies, the brood dissolves into nothing, and Frank escapes with Candice… only to discover she’s developed some suspicious welts. The cycle continues, yada yada, end credits. Cue the vague dread. But it lands with a whimper, not a scream.
Final Thoughts:
The Brood is Cronenberg beginning to truly weaponize his weird. It’s half family drama, half monster movie, and all twisted metaphor. When it works, it’s chilling. When it doesn’t, it feels like a therapy session filmed inside a snow globe. You can see the brilliant film trying to claw its way out, but it keeps tripping over its own malformed children.
Rating: 3 out of 5 psychoplasmic birth sacs.
Not quite a masterpiece, not quite a mess—just a deeply awkward family portrait with a hammer in its hand and blood on its onesie.
