Film+Talk: LOUISE BONNET & NAOMI FRY On THE BROOD

Director: David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg, David Cronenberg

1979 / 92min / DCP

Join Louise Bonnet and cultural critic Naomi Fry for a conversation and screening of The Brood as part of Louise Bonnet Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosian. The pair will discuss how the protagonists of the seven selected films are ruled, betrayed, changed, or unsettled by their bodies, focusing on David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979).

In The Brood, the bitter divorce between the mentally disturbed Nola (Samantha Eggar) and her ex-, Frank (Art Hindle) was pretty messy, so it should be a good sign that she’s finally getting professional help from the renowned Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed)—but Frank can’t help but notice that people on Nola’s long list of enemies keep dying at the hands of asexual, dwarfish assassins, and so he starts to wonder what exactly the experimental therapy practiced at Dr. Raglan’s Somafree Institute consists of… Written while Cronenberg was in the midst of a divorce and custody battle, The Brood is a brutal, bracing airing of anxieties gussied up in grindhouse trappings.

"Cronenberg and his use of body horror, makes it very hard for the viewer not to feel in their own bodies what is happening on the screen, the way it’s impossible not to blink if someone pretends to hit you in the face, even though you know they won’t. I also love that the fascist view of the woman as mother, the romanticizing of childbearing is completely turned around, it is instead rage and revenge and a different kind of power.

The setting, the clothes, the look of the movie are also very familiar, being similar to where and when I grew up, making it even more difficult for me to look away."— Louise Bonnet