A History of Violence

A History of Violence (2005) opens with a man who runs a diner in a small town killing two robbers with surprising skill. Tom is declared a hero and appears on the news. Then some men arrive in town and call him by another name. He says he does not know them. They insist. The question is whether a person can actually leave a past behind or only hide it for a while. It is the plainest looking film Cronenberg made. No body horror, no strangeness; the camera is still and the town is ordinary. But the violence is deliberately ugly: nobody dies gracefully, the wounds are real, and when a scene ends the film keeps you looking. It is adapted from the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke. The best passage is on the staircase; a moment between husband and wife carrying both intimacy and violence, which puts the film's whole idea into one shot. Viggo Mortensen plays two different men with the same face and makes the switch at a visible moment. William Hurt was nominated for an Oscar for roughly ten minutes of screen time. It is cited as one of the last Hollywood films released on VHS. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: thrillers, Cronenberg, and character drama. Less good for: the violence is graphic and two sex scenes are staged to be uncomfortable.