And when the family next sits down to dinner together the air is still taut with new discoveries and the affirmation of very old truths. By letting himself make a simpler kind of picture, Cronenberg has left us not so much with his glittering intelligence as a kind of question that the US has to ask itself.Quite deliberately, I am not telling you the story of A History of Violence. And that is what is so American: for nearly always, I think, the most radical departures in American come with the telling of the old, old stories.So this is a myth composed by a master that operates at the level of pulp fiction, or graphic novel – its actual source material. Something terrible is coming, and we know after just a few minutes that Cronenberg has devised and outfitted the terror in keeping with the “Let’s do an experiment” tone of the title.In the past, Cronenberg has been one of the world’s most creative experimenters with the horror genre. I suspect that was because he felt able to push that genre towards his own necessary economy plus the quite startling dismemberment or parasitic possession of his vision. This was evident in They Came From Within, Rabid, The Brood, The Dead Zone and even The Fly, which was the first glorious blooming of his special sense of humour. But still, there was something very deliberate in Cronenberg that felt unable to get into what you might call popular genre.

But like many ascetics, familiarity with his own medium has made his search for formal beauty more fundamental. But even though this is “sleepy” Indiana, the air is as taut as an old wire ready to snap. The teenage boy is mocked at school for not being as male as Indiana prefers. But Tom and his wife still have a wild, tender sex life of the kind that might not be owned up to in all towns in Indiana.

Born and raised in Toronto, he still lives there, and his work is followed at an international level, but without the solid, financial reward that can change a man, or an artist. When he made Spider a few years ago, an uncompromisingly bleak study of schizophrenia in which Ralph Fiennes had hardly a word of dialogue, Cronenberg’s determination to follow his own vision nearly destroyed the enterprise for lack of funds. And there will be some viewers now inclined to see A History of Violence as a sell-out, a desperate excursion into full-blooded film noir about the kind of things that happen – notoriously – not in Canada but in the United States.
Tom Stall is a gaunt-looking fellow with a dreamy smile on his face and an easy manner that fits in to the small Indiana town where he owns a diner called Stall’s He looks a lot like Viggo Mortensen He has a wife, Maria Bello, and two decent kids. And New Line had their arguments: it wasn’t that David Cronenberg was prepared to have this movie called Recoil! or The Last Day in Tom Stall’s Life. No, this movie has a chilling edge of academic authority or analytic dread It’s called A History of Violence.