Arguably one of the more mainstream works by the celebrated filmmaker David Cronenberg, A History of Violence finds him peering into the heart of darkness in an all-American homestead — and emerging with one of his most memorably unsettling provocations in a career full of them.
In his first of many collaborations with the director, Viggo Mortensen stars as Tom Stall, a family man whose dark past in organized crime comes to light after he literally leaps into action to prevent two would-be robbers from terrorizing his diner. The lethal force and efficiency with which Tom dispatches the assailants makes him a local hero in his idyllic corner of small-town Indiana, but it also unsettles his facade of normalcy.
