Just as his characters' bodies are constantly expanding or decaying (or both), David Cronenberg's art has its own creative mutative flux, and here the low-budget exploitation skin gets shed for a cool-clinical mise en scène as masterly as Bergman's circa Face to Face. Indeed, the opener, glowering doctor Oliver Reed chastising a patient's weakness via role-playing therapy, is prime art-house intensity, raw nerves flowering through the skin against black abstract backgrounds. The blisters emerging in the sessions make up the Shape of Rage, the title of Reed's treatise on "psychoplasmics," professing to cleanse the mind's traumas by expelling them physically, although Art Hindle is not convinced. The husband of Reed's "queen-bee" main patient (Samantha Eggar), all he wants is to keep their tiny pensive daughter (Cindy Hinds) away from danger, not easy when wizened critters in romper snowsuits (resembling children but shorn of details, a copy of a copy) materialize to pulp adults into pools of blood with mallets. The plot would rival The Bob Newhart Show as the definite '70s psychobabble spoof if not for Cronenberg's august complexity and steely execution, an expansion and refinement of his feel for human horror. Made amid the filmmaker's own divorce and child-custody anxieties, it finds deforming emotion in relationships built on oppression (the dwarfish killers are Eggar's rage made flesh, manipulated through mental umbilical cords) as well as a newfound dignity for the people caught in the middle (an old man caressing the police-scene outline where his wife's corpse once was). Like most of the director's work, it's easy to misread the movie's audacity as reactionary disgust, for the upheavals of the body invite dread and fascination in equal portions, and Eggar's "strange adventure" both crystallizes repressed traumas and announces new manifestations of life. It is no coincidence that Cronenberg allows Eggar's anguished matriarch one of his most magisterially repulsive images, her therapeutic whites lifted to reveal a blobby external womb to be bitten open and licked clean. With Nuala Fitzgerald, Henry Beckman, and Susan Hogan.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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