Brood, The: Limited Edition (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: May 27, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
David CronenbergRelease Date(s)
1979 (March 31, 2025)Studio(s)
Les Productions Mutuelles Ltée/Elgin International Productions (Second Sight Films)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: B
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
[Editor's Note: This is a British import. The 4K Ultra HD is Region-Free while the Blu-ray is Region-B locked.]
1979 saw the release of a landmark film that provided a bitter and sometimes quite personal examination of the realities of modern marriage and divorce, with much of the story centering around the custody dispute over a young child. It delved deeply into the emotional stakes involved, including the negative impacts of uncontrolled anger, and that struck a nerve with popular audiences. It became the highest-grossing film of the year at the domestic box office, and it eventually parlayed that momentum into Oscar glory, winning five Academy Awards in 1980 including Best Picture and Best Director.
Unfortunately for genre fans, the runaway success and industry honors ended up belonging to Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer, not David Cronenberg’s The Brood. Cronenberg has never even been nominated for an Academy Award in any capacity, either before or since. (The fact that Dead Ringers didn’t receive a single nomination of any kind, including Best Actor, remains one of the biggest genre snubs in Oscar history.) The Brood was moderately successful, at least by low-budget horror standards, but it entirely failed to capture the popular imagination outside of the handful of horror fans who managed to catch it in 1979. Yet those who did have never forgotten the experience, while the memories of Kramer vs. Kramer have faded somewhat over the years.
The parallels between the two films weren’t lost on Cronenberg, either. While The Brood actually preceded Kramer vs. Kramer into the theatres by several months, he later referred to it as being his version of Kramer vs. Kramer, and even told critic Serge Grünberg that Benton’s film was “The most false, sentimental, bullshit movie ever.” That’s a bit harsh, but there’s a grain of truth to it in that any emotional authenticity in Kramer vs. Kramer was inadvertent, not so much derived from Avery Corman’s 1979 novel as it was the fortuitous result of Dustin Hoffman’s decision to use the personal trauma of his own recent divorce to fuel his Oscar-winning Method performance. (Fortuitous for everyone but Meryl Streep, that is, but her discomfort with Hoffman’s inappropriate on-set behavior did end up influencing her own performance). In comparison, The Brood came by its emotional truth a bit more organically, since it all started at the writing stage.
Cronenberg had just gone through a divorce of his own, including a dispute over the custody of his daughter Cassandra. At the time, he felt that his ex-wife was getting involved in what might have been a cult, and while it later turned out to be a relatively benign religious group, he still felt that wasn’t a good environment for their young daughter. His protectiveness over her was rewarded when he gained custody, and that experience ended up informing the story of The Brood. Cronenberg also believed strongly in catharsis, and writing the script proved extremely cathartic for him since it was a way of working out his own anger toward his ex-wife and her family.
In The Brood, Frank Carveth (Art Hindle) is in an ongoing custody battle with his wife Nola (Samantha Eggar), with their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) caught in the middle. Candice splits her time between living with her father and her mother, which is complicated by the fact that Nola is currently sequestered at the Somafree Institute. It’s a cloistered therapeutic retreat run by Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), author of the book Psychoplasmics, and no one other than Candice is allowed to see Nola. Raglan’s controversial form of therapy involves having his patients bring their suppressed (and repressed) emotions to the fore, which causes physical manifestations on their bodies. That’s had unintended consequences, since Nola’s barely suppressed anger at her troubled upbringing and her failed marriage has resulted in the children of her rage being made flesh. When Frank notices signs of abuse on Candice, he starts to investigate Raglan and the Somafree Institute, and when Nola’s fury turns lethal, Frank is forced to confront her and Raglan directly. The Brood also stars Henry Beckman and Nuala Fitzgerald as Nola’s parents, Susan Hogan as Candice’s schoolteacher, and Robert A. Silverman as one of Raglan’s disgruntled former patients.
As that description should make clear, The Brood anticipated the John Sayles script for Joe Dante’s The Howling, which ended up tossing out the setting of Gary Brandner’s 1977 novel in favor of a therapeutic retreat called The Colony. Sayles went to work on the script for The Howling shortly after The Brood was released, so it’s certainly possible that he was influenced by Cronenberg’s film. Yet Cronenberg wasn’t really interested in pop psychology per se so much as it was just an excuse to explore a concept near and dear to his heart: the mind-body connection, or more precisely, the body’s tendency to become independent from the mind, detaching itself from our direct control. The Brood codified this concept that he had already started to explore in both Shivers and Rabid, leading directly to the idea of the New Flesh that he eventually developed in Videodrome. Cronenberg has long been associated with body horror, and there’s no getting around the fact that The Brood is body horror of the highest order.
Yet there’s a primal element to The Brood that goes far beyond any of Cronenberg’s other films from this period, with the possible exception of Shivers. In that film, the parasites that are transmitted from person to person through sexual contact aren’t really a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease; instead, they’re just the carriers of the real disease: the uncontrollable primal force of sexual desire. In The Brood, the primal force is pure, naked rage, and that’s why the children of Nola’s rage are so formless and shapeless, not really children at all, but something else entirely. Yet they’re every bit the children of Cronenberg’s rage as well, a manifestation of his own suppressed anger toward his ex-wife and her family. (He admitted to Grünberg that he found cathartic value in maximizing the number of blows that one of the brood delivers to Nola’s father, over his editor’s objections, since he still resented his own ex-father-in-law.) Dr. Raglan’s therapy resulted in physical manifestations on the patient’s body, but Cronenberg’s therapeutic catharsis resulted in his darkest emotions being made manifest on celluloid.
All of which makes The Brood one of the most personal films that David Cronenberg has ever directed, although that’s a potentially misleading statement. In reality, all of Cronenberg’s films are personal in one form or another. A film doesn’t have to be derived from personal experience in order to be a personal film. Everything that Cronenberg has ever made, even relatively mainstream productions like The Dead Zone or The Fly, have been filtered through his own perceptions and his own obsessions. That’s the textbook definition of “personal.” It’s just that the direct and indirect autobiographical elements in The Brood resulted in him lashing out by proxy in the same way that Nola’s offspring lash out on her behalf. It was Cronenberg’s personal take on primal scream therapy, and it’s very much a raw, brutal cry of his own personal rage. In a parallel universe, that kind of naked self-expression would have been rewarded the same way that Kramer vs. Kramer was, but that’s not the kind of world in which we live, so Cronenberg’s savage masterpiece has had to settle for cult movie glory instead.
Cinematographer Marc Irwin shot The Brood on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. Second Sight describes this as being “a new 4K restoration approved by Director David Cronenberg,” but there’s no other information available about their 4K master, other than the fact that the disc was authored by Fidelity in Motion, and it’s been graded for High Dynamic Range in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. (Note that previous HD releases were opened up slightly and reframed at 1.78:1, but this one is correctly matted to 1.85:1.)
Now, Criterion’s 2015 Blu-ray of The Brood was also described as being “supervised by Cronenberg,” so given the stark differences between these two versions, it’s a good reminder that just because the original director and/or cinematographer is involved with a home video transfer is no guarantee of consistent or even “accurate” results (Dean Cundey, I’m looking at you). Granted, Criterion’s was based on a 2K scan of the interpositive while this is presumably a 4K scan of the camera negative, but the differences go far beyond the source. This version is undoubtedly cleaner and more detailed, with none of the speckling, dirt, and other artifacts that were visible on Criterion’s version—in fact, it’s pretty much immaculate. The grain is refined and smooth, with no traces of compression artifacts thanks to David Mackenzie’s usual high standards with the encode.
Where The Brood has been run through the (dead) ringer over the years is in terms of the grading. Criterion’s Cronenberg Blu-rays have been notorious for revisionist grades, although it’s worth pointing out that minus an unfaded, approved print from 1979 to serve as a reference, it’s impossible to say if it was Criterion that did the revising, or if the previous versions had been the revisionist ones instead. Their Cronenberg transfers were noticeably darker than anything before or since, but this version of The Brood is significantly brighter in comparison, without ever appearing too bright. The contrast range is essentially perfect here, with deep black levels, and as a result there’s much more depth to the image. The colors are generally richer and better saturated than on Criterion’s disc, but those cold Canadian winter exteriors still look appropriately cool. The flesh tones look flawless, too. In fact, the whole master looks flawlessly filmic, just like a theatrical print, only much higher quality. Absent any reference material of my own for comparison purposes, I can only judge what I see, and this simply looks right to me. It’s damned near reference material.
Like most other physical media releases of The Brood, Second Sight is only including Cronenberg’s preferred 92-minute uncut version of the film, not the shortened R-rated theatrical cut. The differences include more violence in the first murder; more gore in the aftermath of another murder; and more graphic detail during Nola’s reveal, including extended fetus-licking (if you’ve never seen The Brood, that phrase alone should tell you clearly whether or not it’s the film for you). There’s little to no difference between the theatrical footage and the extended footage, so it’s pretty much seamless. There is a noticeable drop in image quality in a few of the closeups of Nola during her final confrontation with Frank, but that’s not added footage; instead, it’s because the decision was made in post-production to optically zoom in on her face, so it’s dupe material.
Audio is offered in English 1.0 mono LPCM, with optional English SDH subtitles. The Brood was released theatrically in mono, and presumably this is more or less the unadulterated theatrical mix (plus extensions for the extra material in the unrated cut). The dialogue sounds a bit boxy with a few harsh sibilants, but that’s likely the way that it was originally recorded, and there are no other issues of note. Howard Shore contributed one of his finest scores for The Brood, and while it may have been nice to hear it presented in stereo as an alternate version, it sounds just fine in mono.
Second Sight’s Region-Free 4K Ultra HD release of The Brood is a two-disc set that includes a Region B Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film (all of the extras are available on both discs, so anyone without a Region-Free player will still be able to access them via the UHD). It also includes 6 art cards and a 120-page booklet featuring essays by William Beard, Jenn Adams, Craig Ian Mann, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Scott Wilson, Amber T, Carolyn Mauricette, and Alexandra West. Everything comes housed in a rigid slipcase featuring new artwork by Krishna Shenoi (the discs are protected by a Digipack, so there’s no reversible insert). Unsurprisingly for a Second Sight release, it’s a strikingly beautiful package. There's also a standard edition version available containing the UHD only in normal Amaray packaging.
The following extras are included on both discs in HD:
- Audio Commentary by Martyn Conterio and Kat Ellinger
- Audio Commentary by William Beard
- Meet the Carveths (19:48)
- Producing The Brood (11:10)
- The Look of Rage (13:33)
- Scoring The Brood (7:51)
- Character for Cronenberg (10:24)
- Cronenberg – The Early Years (13:16)
- Anger Management (22:17)
Second Sight has included two commentary tracks with this release, one new, one archival. The new commentary is with Kat Ellinger and Martyn Conterio, who place the film in the context of the director’s career, and acknowledge its autobiographical component. They feel that the script was ripped out of him the same way that the children of Nora’s rage are ripped out of her (Cronenberg called it automatic writing). Ellinger and Conterio also try to sort out fact from fiction regarding The Brood—while it was indeed a personal film, some of the stories that have arisen surrounding it, like Cronenberg’s actions during the custody battle with his ex-wife, have been greatly exaggerated over the years. They also delve into the way that the script evolved, with Cronenberg originally going into far more detail regarding Nola’s background, but he ultimately decided to leave it more ambiguous. Yet Ellinger and Conterio’s primary focus is providing an analysis of The Brood that delves into its thematic complexity (and they do address the accusations that it’s a misogynistic film, too).
The archival commentary with William Beard, author of The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg, was originally recorded for the 2016 Blu-ray from Wicked-Vision Media in Germany. He also examines the somewhat autobiographical nature of The Brood, as well as the way that Cronenberg’s fascination with the mind-body connection informs the film—it’s another expression of the “monsters from the Id” in Forbidden Planet. He provides some practical information about the making of the film, but he’s more interested in evaluating Croneberg’s style and motifs. There’s some natural repetition here with the new commentary and Beard is prone to describing what’s happening onscreen, but he still offers some alternate perspectives on The Brood.
While most of the rest of the extras are archival ones, Second Sight has added one new feature for this release: Anger Management, a video essay by journalist Leigh Singer. Singer naturally covers the familial disfunction and body horror of The Brood, but he also notes its connection to the pop psychology of the Seventies. Yet his focus is right there in the title: the “look of rage” in Cronenberg’s films (Singer cheekily shows a clip of Bruce Banner’s alter ego and asks if we really like Cronenberg when he’s angry). Singer also surveys other rage-related films like 28 Days Later, Carrie, and yes, the various appearances of the Hulk going back to Ang Lee’s 2003 adaptation. He sees the difference as being the fight-or-flight nature of those films, compared to how Nola’s rage is an outgrowth of the abuse that she suffered as a child, and she’s not consciously aware of the vengeance that she’s unleashed.
With one exception, the rest of the extras are interviews that were originally produced for Second Sight’s 2013 Blu-ray. Meet the Carveths is with Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds, moderated by Chris Alexander of Fangoria magazine. They open by telling stories about Oliver Reed (naturally), and then describe their backgrounds and their experiences making The Brood. They also revisit the school location. Producing The Brood is with producer Pierre David, who talks about the Canadian film industry at that time and bringing this project together. (He also tells Oliver Reed stories.) The Look of Rage is with Marc Irwin, who had written a thesis paper on Cronenberg while he was still in college, so it was easy for him to work within the director’s style. (And yes, more Oliver Reed stories.) Character for Cronenberg is with Cronenberg regular Robert A. Silverman, who played Jan Hartog in the film. He describes his relationship with Cronenberg in general more than his experiences with The Brood in particular. Cronenberg – The Early Years is an interview with the director, which is also more focused on his early career in general rather than on The Brood in particular.
The odd duck here is Scoring The Brood, which is an interview with Howard Shore that was produced for Wicked-Vision Media’s Blu-ray. Speaking of which, none of the rest of the extras from their release are offered here, including a different interview with Cindy Hinds and Mark Irwin, as well as an additional interview with Pierre David. Wicked-Vision also had a German-language commentary with Dr. Marcus Stiglegger and Kai Naumann, as well as the Super 8 digest version of the film. Criterion’s Blu-ray borrowed Meet the Carveths and Cronenberg – The Early Years from Second Sight but dropped the rest of their interviews. On the other hand, it added a new documentary called Birth Pains, an archival Mel Griffen interview with Oliver Reed, and Cronenberg’s second short feature Crimes of the Future. Aside from that, there have been a few other bits and bobs over the years that aren’t included here, like an interview with Cronenberg and Howard Shore that was on a Region 2 French DVD; and episode of The Directors about Cronenberg that was on a Region 2 Anchor Bay DVD; and various image galleries and trailers.
You may or may not want to hang onto any of those previous discs for the extras alone (although Criterion has been dropping Crimes of the Future on various releases going all the way back to their LaserDisc for Dead Ringers, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it crops up again on a future release as well). On the other hand, Second Sight’s 4K remaster of the film itself leaves all other pretenders in the dust. It’s no contest. This may not be the most comprehensive set for The Brood in terms of extras, but it’s unquestionably the definitive 4K presentation of the film. Add in the extensive booklet and Second Sight’s usual impeccable work with the packaging, and you have a gorgeous release that belongs on the shelf of any self-respecting David Cronenberg fan. Highly recommended.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).