The Brood

The angriest film Cronenberg made, written during his own divorce and custody battle, and he has never pretended otherwise.

A psychotherapist has patients externalise their rage physically. One of them, in a marriage breaking up, is producing children from it.

The idea is disgusting and precise, and the film treats it with the same clinical flatness Cronenberg brings to everything: no music stings, no shadows, just a doctor explaining a process in a calm voice while something intolerable happens in the next building.

Samantha Eggar's final scene was cut in several territories for years and is the reason the film has its reputation. Oliver Reed plays the therapist as a man who is entirely sincere, which is worse.

It is also, underneath, about a child being used as a weapon by two adults, and it is unsparing about that in a way that has aged into something quite hard to watch.