The Brood: Cronenberg's Divorce Made Flesh

Cronenberg has said, more than once and without much visible embarrassment, that The Brood is his version of Kramer vs. Kramer. Robert Benton’s film came out the same year, 1979, won Best Picture, and dramatised a custody fight as a decent liberal sorrow in which two reasonable adults hurt each other and a boy makes French toast.

Cronenberg was going through a custody fight of his own while he wrote his. His film has a woman give birth to a sac on the outside of her body, tear it open with her teeth, and lick the child clean while her husband watches. Both films are about the same thing. Only one of them is honest.

Psychoplasmics, and the man selling it

Dr Hal Raglan runs the Somafree Institute, and his therapy has a brand name. Psychoplasmics: the patient is coached to route psychological damage into physiological expression. Rage becomes something you can point at. In the film’s opening scene Raglan performs this in front of a paying audience, role-playing a patient’s father with a cruelty so precise it draws welts up on the man’s skin, live, on stage.

Oliver Reed plays Raglan, and the casting is the film’s masterstroke. Reed by 1979 had a public reputation as an appetite with a career attached, and Cronenberg uses none of that. He makes him quiet. Reed underplays every scene, speaks softly, listens with an unnerving stillness, and the effect is a man whose enormous physical presence has been folded up and put away where it can do more damage. Raglan is not a huckster. He believes. The therapy works, which is the problem, and Reed plays him with the composure of a man who has stopped asking whether working and being good are the same thing.

This is the third variation on Cronenberg’s single character. Emil Hobbes in Shivers wanted to cure the species of thinking. Dan Keloid in Rabid wanted his clinic to matter. Raglan wants to be right, and being right about the human body is, in this filmography, the most reliable way to end up dead in a barn.

Samantha Eggar and the thing the film is actually about

Nola Carveth is at Somafree, isolated from her daughter Candice, in Raglan’s most advanced course of treatment. Her husband Frank (Art Hindle) is fighting to keep the child away from her. Nola’s mother Juliana drank; Nola was beaten as a girl; her father Barton let it happen and now cannot look at it. Three generations of a family in which harm is passed downward and everybody agrees to call it something else.

Samantha Eggar’s performance is a genuinely brave piece of work, and it is the reason the film has aged into something more than a curio. She plays Nola as a wounded person and a monster simultaneously, refusing to let the audience settle. Every argument she makes about Frank is partly true. Every accusation she throws is drawn from a real injury. The film’s horror is generated by the fact that her rage is legitimate and its expression is unforgivable, and Eggar holds both without blinking.

Cronenberg’s anger is all over this and it is aimed in several directions at once, including at himself. Frank Carveth is the point-of-view character and the film does not like him much. He is stolid, self-righteous, certain he is the reasonable one, and his certainty is a wall. Art Hindle plays him with a beige decency that curdles the longer you look. The film’s true subject is a household in which a child watches adults do damage while insisting they are protecting her, and Cronenberg was living in that household while typing.

The mechanics: why the children work

The brood themselves are the most disciplined design in early Cronenberg. Small, snow-suited, hooded figures who move with a child’s gait and a child’s centre of gravity — and the film almost never gives you a clear look at a face. They are shot in the middle distance, from behind, in doorways, in the snow. They arrive, do something appalling with a mallet or a snow globe, and stop.

That restraint is the craft argument. Our piece on the creature restraint principle makes the general case; The Brood is one of the cleanest demonstrations of it in the genre, and the reason is specific rather than merely aesthetic. A child-shaped thing seen clearly is a costume. A child-shaped thing glimpsed is a violation of a category the brain holds sacred, and the brain keeps working on it after the cut. Cronenberg understood that the audience would do the disturbing part unpaid.

Mark Irwin’s photography is the other half. He shoots Ontario winter — white sky, black trees, snow that flattens depth — and the palette gives Cronenberg a horror film with no shadows in it. There is nowhere for anything to hide, which is worse, because the brood do not hide. They walk across open ground towards a kitchen window in daylight.

And Howard Shore scored it. This was his first film score, the beginning of a collaboration that would run through Cronenberg’s entire career and eventually through Middle-earth. What he writes here is a strings-only piece of Herrmann-descended anxiety that never once helps the audience. It does not sting the scares. It grieves under them.

The lineage, and what it broke

The ancestor is Rosemary’s Baby — pregnancy as invasion, a woman’s body as a site other people have plans for. Cronenberg inverts the politics. Polanski’s Rosemary is done to. Nola does, and the film’s discomfort comes from handing the reproductive horror to the mother as an act rather than an affliction. The other clear parent is the killer-children strain that runs through the decade; readers can find the map in the killer kids canon.

It is a hinge in his own work. Shivers and Rabid were arguments about the species. The Brood is the first Cronenberg film about a family, and once he had found that register he made The Fly and Dead Ringers out of it. The autobiography is the upgrade.

The British censors cut it. It sat on the video-nasty adjacent shelves for years in a mangled state, and the restorations that circulate now — the Somafree scenes intact, the ending uncut — are a considerable improvement on the version most British viewers grew up with.

The verdict: this is the most emotionally violent film Cronenberg ever made, and its violence is not in the mallet. It is in a man deciding that the mother of his child is a monster, being right, and being monstrous in the deciding. Kramer vs. Kramer got the statue. The Brood got the truth, and forty-odd years on it is still the only divorce film with the nerve to admit that the parents were enjoying parts of it.

Spoilers below

The reveal is structured as a detective story, which is why it lands. Frank spends the film chasing a cause, and Cronenberg lets him find it in the worst possible order.

Every death tracks Nola’s fury. Juliana dies after Nola has been made to revisit her mother’s failures. Barton dies after he arrives drunk and demands his daughter explain herself. Ruth Mayer, Candice’s teacher, dies after Nola hears Frank might be interested in her — and that killing happens in a classroom, in front of the children, which is the one moment Cronenberg lets the film’s rage off its leash in public.

Raglan’s confession is the pivot. He has known for some time that Nola’s brood are physical offspring, produced parthenogenetically from her body by the therapy he sold her, and he has kept treating her because she is the proof of his life’s work. Reed plays the admission without self-defence, and then goes to the barn to try to save Candice, which is the closest anyone in this film comes to grace.

The climax is Cronenberg’s most notorious sequence, and it is worth being precise about why it works. Frank has to keep Nola calm — the brood act on her emotional state — so he sits with her and lies, tells her he loves her, tells her they can begin again. Nola, moved, wants to show him what she has made. She opens her robe.

The external womb, the sac, the teeth, the licking. What makes the scene unbearable is that Nola is proud. She is showing her husband a child. Eggar plays it as tenderness, and the horror is entirely in the collision between her tenderness and his face. Then Frank’s revulsion shows, and she knows he lied, and the brood upstairs go for Candice.

He strangles her. That is the ending’s cruelty: the reasonable man, the one who was right about everything, ends the film murdering his wife with his hands while his daughter listens.

And then Cronenberg’s last shot, in the car, driving away from it: welts rising on Candice’s arm. The therapy Raglan invented was never the disease. The family was. Nothing has been solved, custody has been settled by homicide, and the damage is already in the next generation with its seatbelt on.