Great Britain

This frightening and controversial film examines, with brutal realism, the complex and multiple causes for wife beating and the complicated and contradictory reactions of women who have suffered it. The story centres on Diane, an attractive young wife and mother, whose husband's love-making becomes strange and violent. Forced to escape from his brutality, she takes refuge with Carrie and her photographer boyfriend Mark with the inevitable results. To support herself she resumes her career as a fashion model. Through Carrie she meets Millie who has also suffered the humiliation of a husband whose love has turned to hate-and Millie remembers with fear: "he began to hate me. I think if we had gone on he'd have taken me apart limb from limb..." THE BRUTE is an explicit dramatisation of the problems of material violence - a problem that in today's society is becoming ever more horrifying prevalent.