A History of Violence: Cronenberg's Quietest, Nastiest Film

David Cronenberg spent thirty years making films about flesh that betrays its owner — exploding heads, gun-tumours, men turning into insects, television sets that breathe. Then in 2005 he made a lean, handsome American thriller set in a small Indiana town, with movie stars and a three-act structure and almost no prosthetics, and it turned out to be one of the most quietly disturbing things he ever put on screen. A History of Violence is Cronenberg’s most accessible film and, watched closely, one of his cruellest.

The body horror did not go away. It went underground. Where the early films located the monster in mutating tissue, this one locates it in an ordinary man’s capacity for sudden, expert brutality, and in the way that capacity turns out to be the most attractive thing about him. The transformation Cronenberg has always filmed — the body becoming something other and terrible — happens here in plain daylight, without a single special effect.

The setup

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) runs a diner in a quiet town, has a loving wife Edie (Maria Bello) and two children, and lives a life of complete unremarkable decency. One night two drifters try to rob and murder his customers, and Tom kills them both with a speed and precision that shocks everyone, including his family. He becomes a local hero, his face is on the news, and shortly afterwards a scarred man named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) arrives from Philadelphia, calls Tom by another name, and insists they have met before.

The film is adapted from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, and Josh Olson’s screenplay strips it down to a fable about identity and inheritance. Cronenberg premiered it at Cannes in 2005 to the kind of reception that suggested audiences knew they had seen something stranger than its surfaces admitted. It sits in the same neo-noir current vo.rs traced through the Coens’ No Country for Old Men — American thrillers that use genre machinery to withhold exactly the catharsis the machinery normally promises.

Cronenberg without the prosthetics

To understand what Cronenberg is doing here you have to hold it against his back catalogue. In Videodrome the flesh mutates in response to media; in The Fly love is filmed as decomposition; across the whole flesh-and-machine project the body is the site where identity comes apart. A History of Violence keeps the obsession and drops the prosthetics. Tom’s body still holds a second self — a killer’s reflexes, a killer’s history — and the film is about that other self forcing its way to the surface.

The continuity of obsession is striking once you look for it. The idea of a self buried inside the body, waiting to be triggered, runs from the game-flesh of eXistenZ straight through to his son’s work in Possessor, where identity is literally hijacked and worn. A History of Violence is the same anxiety in a flannel shirt: the fear that the person you present to the world is a costume over something older and less domesticated. Cronenberg simply relocates the monster from the laboratory to the diner.

The violence, when it comes, is filmed with clinical honesty. Cronenberg shows the aftermath: the ruined faces, the bodies that do not fall cleanly, the twitching. He refuses the choreographed weightlessness of the action genre. A punch breaks a nose that then bleeds for the rest of the scene. This is the surgeon’s eye he brought to body horror, now trained on what a fist and a boot actually do, and it makes the film’s few bursts of action genuinely hard to watch even as they are genuinely thrilling — which is the trap being set.

The two sex scenes

The film’s real argument lives in its bedroom. Cronenberg gives Tom and Edie two sex scenes, and the contrast between them is the whole thesis. The first, before the killings, is playful and tender — a wife dressing up, a couple in love. The second, after Edie has begun to suspect who her husband really is, is violent, furious, half-assault and half-desire, staged on a staircase and leaving her bruised. She is disgusted and aroused at once, and so, the film suggests, are we.

This is Cronenberg refusing to let the audience off the hook. He has spent the film thrilling us with Tom’s competence at killing, and now he asks what that thrill is made of, and where else in a life it might surface. Maria Bello’s performance is fearless here; she plays a woman discovering that the danger in her husband is inseparable from her attraction to him. The film shares this queasy honesty about violence and desire with the erotic-thriller tradition, though it is far colder and more clinical than any of them, closer in spirit to the noir that curdles into damnation in Angel Heart than to anything glossier.

Why it works

The genius of the construction is Mortensen’s double performance. He plays Tom as genuinely, unshowily good — a decent man, warm with his kids, patient with his customers — and then he lets a second person surface through the same face, someone still, watchful and lethal. He never signals the switch with acting fireworks. He simply becomes still in a different way, and you feel the temperature of the man change. It is one of the great controlled performances of its decade.

What the film is finally about is inheritance — the violence a man carries and the violence he passes on. Cronenberg watches Tom’s teenage son begin to solve his own problems with his fists, watches the family absorb what the father is, and asks whether brutality is a thing you can leave behind or a thing that waits in the blood. The graphic-novel source gave him a pulp revenge structure; Cronenberg used it to make a film about the American love affair with redemptive violence and the lie at the centre of it. Every genre beat is honoured and every genre comfort is withdrawn, which is exactly the move that makes it stick.

Where to watch: it is widely available to rent and streams in rotation on the prestige platforms. Pair it with Cronenberg’s own gangster follow-up in the same register, or with the Coens’ snowbound morality play Fargo, another film that films violence as something clumsy, consequential and quietly appalling rather than cool.

Spoilers below

Fogarty is right. Tom Stall is a fiction. The man was born Joey Cusack, a Philadelphia mob enforcer who did terrible things — including, we learn, ripping out Fogarty’s eye with barbed wire — and then reinvented himself, buried Joey, and built a decent life on top of the grave. When Fogarty threatens the family, Joey resurfaces fully, kills Fogarty and his men, and the town’s hero is revealed as a former killer who was very, very good at it.

The masterstroke is the final act, when Tom drives to Philadelphia to confront his brother Richie (William Hurt, indelible in barely fifteen minutes of screen time). Richie runs the operation Joey abandoned and wants him dead for the trouble his disappearance caused. Tom kills his way out — competent, remorseless, Joey entirely in the driving seat — and then goes home. Cronenberg refuses the redemption the structure has been promising. There is no speech, no reckoning, no punishment. Joey simply cleans up and returns to Indiana.

The last scene is one of the most devastating endings in modern crime cinema, and it is played almost entirely in silence. Tom walks into his kitchen where his wife and children are eating dinner. Nobody speaks. His young daughter sets a place for him. His son passes him the food. Edie looks at him, and the camera holds on her face as she decides — or fails to decide — whether this man, whose real self she has now seen kill, can be let back into the family. Cronenberg cuts to black before anyone says a word. The film has argued all along that violence is not something you leave behind, and the ending makes the audience sit inside that argument with no resolution offered. The Stalls will take Joey back, because the alternative is unthinkable, and everyone at that table now knows exactly what he is. That is the quiet nastiness of the title made flesh: the history of violence does not end. It just moves to the head of the table and is passed the potatoes. Cronenberg lets the plates and the cutlery do what a lesser film would have handed to a monologue, and the ordinariness is the wound.