Sexually compulsive zombies, exploding heads, a cockroach typewriter, videogames that plug into your spine ... these are some of the most memorable elements of David Cronenberg's past films. The Canadian director got his start with underground horror films like Shivers and The Brood, and looked poised to break out of cult status in the 1980s with the success of Scanners (that's the one with the exploding heads) and his two forays into the mainstream, 1983's The Dead Zone and 1986's The Fly. Instead, Cronenberg pressed on with quirky, often uncommercial projects, always retaining his independent sensibility and his penchant for exploring the horrors of the human body.
Cronenberg's new film, A History of Violence, once again vaults him into the mainstream, and it's not with a man who can see the future or turns into a fly. Violence is a serious, weighty drama, but it's one that nevertheless does what Cronenberg always does best: It takes a pulpy genre story and treats it with the importance and heft of any epic costume drama. More than any other director, Cronenberg knows that zombies, psychics and gangsters can tell us deep things about the human condition if we only give them a chance.
Like Cronenberg's last film, 2002's underrated Spider, Violence is concerned not with what horrors our bodies can succumb to, but the horrors contained within our minds. It starts with a masterful opening sequence, one long, beautiful tracking shot that follows two nameless killers as they leave the site of a motel massacre. Cronenberg then takes us to a small Indiana town where family man Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) owns a friendly, little diner and lives with his wife Edie (Maria Bello), their teenage son Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes). Into Tom's seemingly perfect existence come the killers from the opening, intent on causing a great deal of trouble in Tom's diner.
Tom takes care of the killers with a cold efficiency, saving his patrons from untold violence and becoming a local hero in the process. Unfortunately, all the press coverage attracts the attention of a trio of shady mobsters led by Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), an oily, sinister man with a mangled eye. Fogarty and his associates claim to know Tom from his past, albeit by a different name in a different town, and they're looking for a little payback.
Although there are twists and reveals along the way, Violence is more about what happens to a seemingly happy man and his seemingly happy marriage when a supposedly forgotten past intrudes than it is about the meat-and-potatoes, good-guy-vs.-gangsters revenge tale. Cronenberg plays the tale out in a straightforward, restrained fashion, draining the story of any sensationalism it might have otherwise possessed. Thus, while the basic plot outline could be the blueprint for a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, Cronenberg peels back the layers to reveal a story about a man who's meticulously constructed his life out of a series of lies, and doesn't know what to do when those lies slowly start to crumble.
It's only in the sex and the violence that Cronenberg shows his trademark brutality, depicting beatings, shootings and stabbings with stark realism, careful to emphasize the very real consequences of the kind of violence often taken for granted in films like this. He also stages two startling sex scenes that bookend the breakdown of the Stalls' marriage. In the first, Edie dresses as the ultimate wholesome stereotype—a cheerleader—and jokes that Tom's been "bad." In the second, after Tom's badness has been firmly established, the two violently couple on the stairs of their house, channeling all of their tension and anxiety into a loveless, disturbing act.
Mortensen masterfully pulls off the task of playing a man who's playing a part, and the glimpses of Tom's old self that occasionally shine through in his performance are brought forth subtly and believably. Bello is devastatingly effective as Edie, who loses as much from Tom's deception as he does, if not more. The villains betray a bit of the story's clichéd underbelly, especially William Hurt in a small but pivotal role as a mob kingpin, but Cronenberg pulls all of the elements together so seamlessly that all that comes through is his uncompromising and powerful vision of how the choices we make shape our lives.