After the painful breakup of her marriage, Nola Carveth seeks treatment at an experimental psychiatric clinic known as the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmatics. While there, under the care of Dr. Raglan, the institute's founder, she is encouraged to work through her subconscious feelings of hurt and rage in a rather novel way: through bodily manifestation. Some of the clinic's patients develop grotesque sores, others cancerous growths or tumors. But Nola goes a step further. She gives "birth" to living incarnations of her darkest inner impulses. Once released, these walking ids exact gruesome revenge against Nola's family, especially her ex-husband, for every real and imagined slight that she has suffered at their hands over the course of her troubled life. THE BROOD is one of director David Cronenberg's darkest and most twisted films.