Lewes Film Club - A History of Violence

A History of Violence is a rare beast, an art-house shoot’em up, which portrays scenes of gruesome violence and leaves the audience spending the next few days wondering about the ambiguous nature of their reaction to them. Viggo Mortensen plays a diner manager enjoying his small-town Indiana life with a loving lawyer wife and two well-adjusted kids. You think ‘can this be a film by David Cronenberg?’ Then you realize it is. Mortensen’s life is disrupted when two murderers we have seen in action in the first scene of the film enter his diner and threaten to rape and kill the clientele. In a flash they lie dead on the floor at the hands of the diner manager, who becomes a local hero for his brutal action.

But this is just the beginning of a cycle of violence. Shortly afterwards a creepy Ed Harris turns up in town, and accuses Mortensen of having mutilated his eye in a former life as a contract hit man. We don’t know who or what to believe as the plot twists and turns towards its edge-of-the-seat finale. A riveting, thought-provoking and very, very disturbing film, and one with a Darwinian morale to it, according to Cronenberg. But who is the fittest, evil Ed or violent-but-good Viggo? DL