By Simon Thompson
Put simply, David Cronenberg’s The Brood is a movie which stays under your skin long after you’ve seen it. The Brood is one of the more interesting entries in Cronenberg’s filmography, because when you look at it now, with the added benefit of hindsight, you can see the two sides of his style working in perfect harmony. The Brood is both a slow burn psychological thriller made by Cronenberg as the anti-Kramer Vs Kramer, but also revels in some of the most viscerally disgusting body horror, that no matter how much alcohol you consume will be forever imprinted on your brain.
The plot of The Brood follows Frank ( Art Hindle), a divorced dad trying to gain custody of his five year old daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds), from his ex-wife Nola (Samantha Egar). The only problem is that Nola is enrolled in an experimental psychotherapy programme headed by a shadowy psychiatrist named Dr Hal Raglan ( Oliver Reed), whose controversial methods involve keeping Nola under observation indefinitely until he feels she has made significant progress. While this is all going on, however, a series of brutal and strange murders are happening one after another.
What makes The Brood so chilling is that it’s filmed in a very naturalistic way. For a lot of the movie the camera is held still, and this gives the visuals a documentarian quality reminiscent of William Friedkin’s masterpiece The Exorcist. This isn’t to say, however, that Cronenberg doesn’t pull something out of his bag of tricks at all, with the use of slanted angles and quick cuts during a particularly brutal murder scene showcasing his ability to frighten, yet compel an audience to keep watching at the same time.
The acting is solid throughout. Art Hindle gives an understated everyman performance as Frank, Samantha Egar practically steals the whole movie with her performance as Nola, and Oliver Reed does a great sinister villain turn as Raglan, giving him a kind of Dr Frankstein hoisted by his own petard quality that really draws you into his character.
The music, by frequent Cronenberg collaborator Howard Shore, really helps to establish the movie’s unsettling atmosphere. Shore’s use of dissonant sounds, such as tuned down string instruments mixed with heavy bass and 1970s prog-rock style instrumentation, provide a sonic backdrop that has an almost hypnotic quality.
If you’re interested in early Cronenberg, The Brood is definitely one of his better works from this point in career. While I don’t hold it in the same esteem as Scanners, Videodrome, or The Fly, The Brood is still an extremely well made, fascinating piece of psychological body horror that is worth your time.
The Brood is now available in 4K and on Blu-Ray from Second Sight Films.
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