Some could argue that Canada’s weird-meister has been assimilated into the mainstream. Certainly A History Of Violence plays in part like an orthodox gangster film, or many family-under-threat thrillers, albeit one with a certain twist from the Twilight Zone. If anything, Cronenberg has diverted the main stream to his advantage.

Tom and Edie Average (Mortensen and Bello) are quiet owners of a small town life until Tom becomes an unwitting hero, fatally curtailing the ambitions of gun-toting thugs. This stunt attracts a media frenzy and bigger fish that feed from it – notably Ed Harris sporting a grotesque injury he claims Tom gave him in a former life as a gangster. Thing is, neither Edie nor their children know anything about this other Tom. Thing is, the desires of even bigger fish unlocks a world of violence for which Tom’s family is seriously unprepared.

The alien environments that are so much a feature of Croenberg’s work (eXistenZ or Naked Lunch) are subsumed into the texture of this riveting film. There’s an uneasy, churchy tone about Tom and his town that makes the sudden developments as improbable as they are anticipated. It’s the paradoxic nature of narrative and execution that makes A History of Violence such a joy – even the unlikely pleasure of such vicious and unnecessary hostility is a measure of the filmmaker’s skill. Here is the kind of mainstream film that would otherwise star Nicolas Cage and all that begets. Instead, it becomes a skilful exposition on criminal deceit, the contemporary role of violence and all that begets instead.

// COLIN FRASER