This genuinely creepy and upsetting stomach churner from David Cronenberg offers an intriguing metaphor for both unexplained bodily changes and the mental abuse some parents heap on their offspring.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2024

The picture is Cronenberg’s most satisfyingly melodramatic work, fully realized for emotional consequences over typical horror revulsion, and a crucial stepping stone in the advancement of one of today’s most important filmmakers.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 3, 2023

Though not entirely successful as a piece of entertainment, it represents an important stage in the development of body horror cinema.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 15, 2023

It’s intensely personal, a hostile work of art.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 1, 2022

Nothing much to shock here. Plenty to laugh at.

| Jul 25, 2022

A rare peek into the private life of this intimidatingly intellectual filmmaker, whose work is always personal but seldom autobiographical.

| Jun 3, 2022

The care, the detail, the ferocity of it all really was compelling, and I think Cronenberg has only continued to web a deeply compelling line between sex, trauma, and gender.

| Nov 2, 2021

One of Cronenberg's earliest, but also one of his best. It's a weird and gross journey into his post-divorced mind that plays out wonderfully on screen.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 29, 2020

One of the films that gave rise to the term "body horror," David Cronenberg's 1979 shocker is a characteristic mix of the sombre, the wacky and the viscerally grotesque.

| Oct 30, 2020

The Brood is the stuff of nightmares on every level, the recurring kind that stick with you and infect the rest of your day, long after you wake up. A dark, twisted parable, it stands as one of David Cronenberg's most unsettling works.

| Original Score: A | Jul 3, 2020

Cronenberg keeps such a distance from his characters that there's virtually no involvement. But he does an effective, efficient, cold job on it.

| Jul 19, 2019

Rage, between people in love, gives birth to nasty things we'd rather believe never existed in us.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 6, 2019

[Cronenberg's] rapid fire direction keeps you bouncing back and forth between laughter and shock with only minor stops for explanatory dialogue and his satirical sophistication never stoops to cheap parody.

| Apr 28, 2018

the horrors are simultaneously literal and allegorical, springing from a deep emotional well that transcends the bounds of conventional drama

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 29, 2015

As is often the case with Cronenberg, the intriguing subtext (here, the damage caused by divorce and the dubious benefits of psychology) is neutered by an amateurish and even risible storyline as well as inconsistent characters who make little sense.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 17, 2015

A cinematic bad dream that generates recurring nightmares.

| May 4, 2015

Shedding the grindhouse skin of the early films for a cool-clinical sheen, Cronenberg exhumes the deformed feelings of relationships erected on circles of pain while locating a bruised new dignity in the characters caught in them

| Oct 20, 2013

A horror entry which casts children in the role of malevolent little monsters, The Brood is an extremely well made, if essentially unpleasant, shocker.

| Dec 4, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 2, 2007

Another terrifying gem from Cronenberg's early years

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 15, 2005