The Brood story
A man attempts to track down his mentally-ill ex-wife, who has been sequestered by a psychologist known for his controversial therapy techniques. A series of brutal unsolved murders serve as the backdrop for the central narrative.
11 total · 6 major · 4 minor
| Theme | Level | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| anger | major | Hal Raglan getting his patients to out their anger was a recurring them. Moreover, Nola's inner anger somehow drove the brood of androgynous dwarfs to brutally murderer people. |
| custody battle | major | Frank was fighting his wife Nola to win custody of their five-year-old daughter Candice. |
| father and daughter | major | The film centered around Frank and his five-year-old daughter Candice. |
| hatred | major | We ultimately learned that Nola was filled with hatred. Moreover, that she had birthed a brood of strange, androgynous dwarf children. And to top it all off her inner rage channeled into her brood of creatures and it would cause them to brutally murder people. |
| mental illness | major | Nola Carveth was a severely mentally disturbed woman who was being treated by the psychotherapist Hal Raglan using a technique he called "psychoplasmics". Another man was convinced that he had to keep moving or else his lymphatic system would shutdown, as this system is circulatory in nature, yet has no counterpart to the heart. |
| murder | major | Some strange, androgynous child-like creatures were going around brutally beating people to death. The newspaper dubbed them "the dwarf killers". |
| childhood trauma | minor | A doctor worried that Candice would be traumatized from witnessing her grandmother's brutal murder. |
| coping with the death of a spouse | minor | The grandfather turned into a maudlin wreck of a man upon visit the old house in which his ex-wife (the grandmother) had been brutally murdered. |
| grandmother and granddaughter | minor | Frank left little Candice to stay with her grandmother for awhile. Te grandmother was brutally murdered in her own home before Frank returned to pick Candice up. |
| husband and wife | minor | Toward the very end of the film, Frank went to visit his wife Nola at Hal Raglan's facility in an effort to get Candice back. Frank didn't have any contact with his wife outside of this visit. |