The children are

By Noel Vera
DVD Review
The Brood
Directed by David Cronenberg

INTERESTING to chart the course of David Cronenberg’s career as if it were a pathology, the coursing progress of a disease through the body — from early infection (disease first enters and incubates inside body) to prodromal (initial signs cue body that something’s wrong) to full manifestation (symptoms run rampant) to response (body attempts to subdue the disease) to recovery/reintegration (disease if not fully destroyed is integrated with body).

Wouldn’t call The Brood (out in Blu Ray Oct. 13) an early work — Cronenberg seems already aware of infection (Shivers, Rabid) — but with this feature you might say he’s past prodromal stage, and the symptoms have become fully manifest. Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) is being treated at the Somafree Institute, under care of Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). The institute encourages the manifestation of one’s repressed anger as a means of therapy; meantime Nola’s husband Frank (Art Hindle) has to deal with the mysterious killings that follow their daughter Candy (Cindy Hinds).

Is Candy in danger? Do the murders have anything to do with Nola’s radical new therapy? Does Dr. Raglan have a role in all this? As Roger Ebert points out in his pan of the film, the answers are obvious going in, as are the flaws: the film is awkwardly staged and acted, the pacing glacially slow, the dialogue clunky, the narrative oddly structured.

The reviewer’s correct on all points and yet his complaints feel somehow weightless — this is not a film of conventional coherence or regularly scheduled shock moments but of fragile moods, of slow-dripping dread developing into deadpan depictions of horror.

You see it from the opening sequence, an unexplained exchange between two men: one angry, the other anguished. At one point anguished rips his robe off to expose the red welts on his body — but the exchange was disturbing long before with its hints of parental abuse (and the faintest whiff of incestuous regard). Turns out Dr. Raglan was staging a psychodrama with his patient Mike (Gary McKeehan) before a large audience, but 1.) you already have doubts about Raglan (with Reed in the role you don’t expect a physician’s tender compassion) and 2.) a tone full of uneasy undercurrents has been established, including the significant gesture of violently pulling off one’s clothes in a moment of high drama.

The killings are obliquely staged — the first full-on shot of the killer has the victim’s body blocking our view (Howard Shore’s use of a Bernard Hermann pastiche is an unfortunate choice, however); later Cronenberg makes the witty observation that in wintertime — zipped up and thoroughly gloved — it’s hard to distinguish one child from another, much less one child from another pretending to be a child. The latter killing is far more disturbing, partly for the speed of what happens and the supposed innocuousness of the setting (Candy’s school), partly for the sight of children forced to watch violence happen in front of them.

The premise is quickly, thuddingly, conspicuously established: every time Nola is displeased the offender is violently killed. There’s the unpleasant suggestion of misogyny — Cronenberg was struggling for custody of his daughter from his first marriage when he was developing the film, and you can see where the anger is being directed.

Yet I submit there are other forces at work. Nola isn’t a pure villainess; she’s angry because she was abused as a child — as much a victim, Cronenberg implies, as any of the people killed — and she desperately wants her family back together. If she’s unstable, if she has hurt Candy before that makes her dangerous but doesn’t necessarily make her evil — Cronenberg seems cautious about applying the label, if at all. Even Raglan isn’t the standard-issue mad scientist: he’s visibly struck when Nola fully reveals her childhood trauma, and risks his life when everything goes wrong.

Cronenberg gives everything away in the climactic moment (Warning: skip the rest of the article if you intend to see the film!) when Nola reveals herself to be the mother of a monstrous brood, the psychosomatic incarnations of her anger. When she lifts her robe up to show us the bag of pulsating flesh feeding off of her belly the image seems horrifying, yes, but also — thanks to the way Cronenberg frames and lights her — glamorous, powerful, sensuously charged. The film is a cautionary tale about scientific overreach, yes, but also the story of one woman’s struggle to accept and express herself; on that latter score Nola succeeds far beyond Dr. Raglan’s wildest dreams.

One detail in the scene — suggested by Eggar and eagerly seized upon by Cronenberg, that a mother would lick her newborn clean of blood — is the single most memorable in the picture, but also the single purest expression of love. We’re repulsed, but Cronenberg seems to suggest that we should also be ashamed — that if we can’t accept the beauty of the moment as well as the horror then there’s something monstrous about us too.

How does Frank stop Nola? By strangling her, which seems… wrong. He has to save his daughter, yes, but in doing so kills Nola in all her power and beauty, and her brood. (Do her progeny have souls? Are they capable of independent thought? Cronenberg establishes that they operate as an extension of her consciousness which suggests otherwise, but doesn’t definitively answer the question — maybe they develop independence later? You wonder if the question were an exercise left for the audience to work out afterwards). Frank does get his comeuppance though — when driving away with Candy, Cronenberg quietly pans down to tiny little blisters growing on her right hand.