It's an ordinary day in Millbrook. Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), A History of Violence's jovial hero, wakes up, kisses his pretty blond wife, Edie (Maria Bello), and sits down to breakfast with his two children: anxious adolescent Jack (Ashton Holmes) and doll-perfect Sarah (Heidi Hayes). He heads off to work at the diner that bears his name, Edie to her public-interest law office, and Jack to school, where he gets picked on by the usual bullies. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that some miles away, in a roadside motel, three freshly killed bodies are stinking up the lobby. Trouble is on the way.

Nestled snug in the heart of the heartland, wrapped in a geographical cocoon, the Stalls would seem to be ripe for a rude awakening. Even young Jack knows their outwardly idyllic life isn't all it's cracked up to be. As he quips to a classmate, all they can look forward to is a future in which "we grow old, we have affairs, and we become alcoholics." In a different movie, Jack would be the one who escapes to the big city. Instead, the city comes to him. (Spoilers follow.)

One night, just as Tom is closing up the diner, the motel killers (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk) come through the door, with appetites that won't be sated by coffee and pie. Within seconds, they've taken a customer hostage and made their homicidal intentions clear. Seconds later, both men lie dead on the floor, one with his jaw half-shot away, a useless, gibbering sound issuing from his throat. Tom Stall is a hero, and his life is over.

The cameras descend on Millbrook in a swarm, followed by three men in dark suits, each with his own idea of who Tom Stall is. On the news, he's a "hard-working small business owner," and an "American hero." To the men in suits, led by scarred, dead-eyed Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), he looks a lot like Joey Cusack, the Philadelphia hit man who took out one of Fogarty's eyes with a strand of barbed wire. To his family, Tom is a man they thought they knew, with a capacity for carnage they never suspected.

David Cronenberg's oeuvre is full of double lives and false pasts, but rarely do they take so long to emerge. For Cronenberg initiates, History's slow burn is merely a delaying tactic; Tom Stall is as likely to be who he claims as The Fly's Seth Brundle is to become human again. Skin, once ripped off, never grows back; wounds don't heal; and lies don't become truth. But there's a purpose to the movie's leisurely opening, with its periodic reminders that killers are closing in: Each time you set eyes on Millbrook's perfect streets, where even the litter is clean, Cronenberg wants alarm bells to be ringing in your head. The better it looks, the more wrong things feel.

An open-ended allegory that courts interpretation while shrugging off specifics, History traces its way back to Philadelphia, birthplace of the nation and William Hurt's second-rate mob kingpin (the rare convincing Hurt turn, in that its inauthenticity is probably deliberate). Cronenberg's views on, say, the U.S. invasion of Iraq are not hard to suss out — consider that Tom's violent actions, however justified, have unforeseen consequences that make future bloodshed inevitable. But the movie digs deeper. Politics, after all, is concerned with the mind, while Cronenberg has always been fascinated with the flesh. What distinguishes Tom Stall is not his ability to kill, but his willingness to lie about it — to himself first of all. ("I thought Joey was dead," he howls, as if he could murder his own murderousness.) In America, every man is free to reinvent himself, but Tom's personality graft won't take. Whatever he's done before we meet him, it won't stay buried.

Precise but admirably unslick, A History of Violence is a movie about surfaces, particularly the ones Americans, and moviegoers, use to cover their animal impulses. The first time Tom and Edie make love, it's a prosaic (if surprisingly erotic) cheerleader fantasy, Edie's attempt to give the couple a high school past they never had. The next time, after Tom has killed in their front yard, the sex is hard, brutal and undeniably great, a mutual rape that turns on things they would rather leave off. Violence has not intruded into their lives. It's always been there, but now it's impossible to deny.

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