4/5
[icopyright one button toolbar]
Horror has a unique power to slip under the skin and borough into the least charted, most vulnerable cracks of our identities. This quality isn’t isolated to horror, of course, but there’s something about the immediacy of fear that shines past the layers and speaks to our innermost animal. The best horror isn’t frightening because limbs are lopped and throats are slashed; it’s frightening because beneath the bombast lurks something anxiously true that we deny in our day-to-day existence. Thus is the case in The Brood, a beautifully crafted movie about the not-so-beautiful ways in which we nurse our rage to be carried by the ones who least deserve it — the ones we love.
We open on two men, doctor and patient, sitting across from one another, each with their eyes fixed on those of the other. As we cut back and forth between the two of them, they role-play in an intense dialog, a mercurial dance of nothing but their deepest impulses. This play, as we soon discover, is actually a form of therapy referred to by its creator, Dr. Hal Raglan (Olive Reed), as psychoplasmics. Though psychoclasmic role-playing, the patient exhausts their neuroses by allowing them to physically manifest as growths and legions on their skin. I can’t imagine that last detail seeming particularly appealing to Frank Carveth, but if it helps his wife, so be it. Frank, we learn, is in the midst of a less than savory divorce, and his wife Nola now lives on-site at Dr Raglan’s private healthcare facility where she too takes part in overwrought, deeply seeded dialogs with the doctor to attempt to regain emotional stability.
Where does this leave their daughter Candice? Her presence in the war zone is largely passive. Or is it? Nola’s mother warns Frank of the resentment Candice may very well be pooling right beneath the awareness of all of them. She may not understand it, but she’ll learn to, and all too well, one might add. Who will she blame first? It could be Frank for not holding things together for her sake, or it could be her mother for beating and abusing her, for texturing her back with cuts, gashes, and bruises. Before they’re given time to consider this, people start showing up dead. Grotesquely deformed creatures begin to emerge seemingly out of thin air and murdering those who get close to Frank and Candy, and with the details each murder brings, we wonder more and more how they’re connected to psychoplasmics and Dr. Raglan’s hermetic seal on the goings-on of his facility.
I cannot provide any more snippets than that, as it would spoil not simply trite story revelations but also very crucial emotional ones. This is a horror rooted in the ways human beings treat one another, a kind of violence of manners, and as with every Cronenberg film, these relationships are made flesh through visuals so skin-crawling that they often overshadow the more subtle dramatic brushstrokes of his filmmaking. Yes, there are moments of blood-curdling gore, but too often are these considered the spine of Cronenberg’s repertoire and sensibility. The very first scene between Oliver Reed and his patient is as much a testament to the possibilities of narrative cinema as any. Two actors flawlessly lit, the camera hypnotized into place, and dialog that speaks not necessarily from the soul but from the molten depths of the subconscious.
Pay close attention to very last scene of the film, specifically the closing shot. Yes there is — spoiler ahoy — a shot of growths on Candice’s hands, but what punctuates the scene is a close-up on Candy’s eyes. Cast in shadow, we get a sense of the darkness welling up behind them— an abscess of the soul beginning to swell with the same rage that tore her mother and father apart. It is the quiet tenderness of a scene like this that cement Cronenberg as a master. Beneath the blood and the foam latex, there is a mind of insurmountable humanity, a person who understands that the alienating and the achingly resonant are a lenticular image, two faces of the same prism.
Cronenberg has called this film his version of the Oscar-winning Kramer VS Kramer. I admit to never having seen Kramer VS Kramer, but my suspicions suggest it’s a very different experience. In light of The Brood’s power, one has to imagine what it’d be like to see him lending his eye to other Award-worthy classics. Picture the bizzarities. What would a Cronenberg Driving Miss Daisy look like, for example? Or was that Cosmopolis? Probably.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: www.spencermoleda.com
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]