Mother's Day

'The Brood' (1979) interrogates motherhood with a fine tooth comb. Nola is locked away at an experimental psychiatric facility with the radical Dr. Hal Raglan. She is his star patient. A kind of Frankenstein monster, Nola acts as an expression of his practice, his theories, his results, and his narcissism. He encourages Nola to turn her thoughts to flesh and release them. All of her anger and frustration manifests into the one thing her life revolves around: birth. Nola births her rage into an army of tiny creatures hell bent on avenging all the wrongs against mom.

Nola's parents are found brutally murdered just weeks apart. Her daughter Candice, sonically witnesses her grandmother's murder while alone in the house. She is also found alone in the house after her grandfather's murder. Authorities are puzzled, and Frank is concerned about his daughter's welfare.

Candice is not only personally attacked but environmentally attacked when the brood viciously slaughters her school teacher. It’s suggested that the school teacher is murdered because of her budding relationship with Nola's soon-to-be ex-husband, Frank, but that’s much too neat. Being a now single parent, Frank leans on Candice’s school teacher for support – perhaps to a fault. Once Nola discovers this she is set on an agonizing path that ignites her psychological parameters. Nola’s one obsession is being a mother, incidentally, a much better one than her own. During her sessions, it is revealed that Nola lived a very violent childhood with her mother assaulting her, and her father standing idly by. She wants to have a corrective experience through Candice. However, in the first 10-minutes of the film you’re confronted with the allegation that Nola is physically abusing Candice during their weekly visits. When Frank suggests that ‘the kid’ stay with him, Nola panics, and as she is encouraged to do, turns her thoughts to flesh.

Nola dispatches the brood, lusting to punish the past – her foundation, her legacy. In all of the violence of the film there remains one character that is physically unharmed: Frank. For all of Nola's anger about divorce, suspected cheating, and a child custody war she opts to never channel that rage enough to cause Frank any harm. Therefore, he is free in the final minutes of the film to be violent towards Nola. When Frank ascends upon the psychiatric retreat he is determined to retrieve his kidnapped daughter and stop his wife. Even Dr. Raglan is on his side, once he, too, realizes he cannot control Nola – that her anger has flight.

Frank finds Nola in the barn, draped in white. He tries to manipulate her by pretending to want to understand. For a moment she is taken by this, for the first time in the film she has a sense that her family can be whole again. She stands and throws open her silk robe to reveal an external womb. There’s a pulsating cord running from her stomach to a small sack. Nola takes the sack and rips it open with her teeth. She reveals one of her brood, naked and covered in blood. Nola takes the fetus and instead of kissing it, she begins to lick it clean. It is a truly animal moment, making motherhood carnal. Cronenberg engraves and personifies the womb. It has anger, resentment -- memory. It is a haunted house of sexual experiences, desperate to avenge itself. Nola's brood takes all of that on, fearlessly.

Frank becomes immediately disgusted, Nola recognizes this. She sees through his act and begins to rant that she would rather kill her daughter than let him take her away and give her to someone else – someone more “fit”. In this moment, elsewhere on the grounds, Candice is being attacked by her quasi-siblings as her mother rages. Motherhood emerges as a gaping wound oozing all over the place. It is the cavern where one can lose themselves, as Nola did.

Frank orders Nola to make them stop, she refuses, and so he unleashes his own rage—his own violence. He strangles Nola to stop the brood. He murders the mother of his child with his own two hands, ironically to protect Candice. As Frank places his daughter in the car it is clear she has finally seen too much. The camera zooms in to reveal that she has raised bumps emerging on her arms, similar to her mother when she was a child. Franks violence and betrayal disturbed the legacy of female rage in his daughter. He killed not for vengeance against wrongs, but purely for control. Nola, at least, had purpose.