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andrewduckerPlot (only what gets given away in the trailer): Viggo Mortensen runs a café in a small suburban town. His peaceful life is disrupted one day when two men try to rob the place, and he manages to kill them both before the can kill his staff. However, this attracts the attention of Ed Harris, who claims that Viggo has a hidden past, a past that has left unfinished business.
Review:
If there’s one thing that’s remained constant in the works of David Cronenberg it’s his fascination with what lies just underneath the skin, and his horror at what might break through at any moment.
In much of his earlier work this is literal – people are physically transformed from the ordinary into the other, their flesh warping as their minds fracture, their physical selves changed to mirror the unpleasantness underneath. What clearly comes out of his films is that here is a man who is scared of the possibilities of human emotion, and of the terrible things that could be hiding just behind the masks of normality all around us.
A History of Violence continues this theme, and although it drops the SFnal elements that make metaphor physical, in many ways the transformation is all the more scary because of it. When it comes right down to it, you can wander out of early Cronenberg sure that parasites are not going to warp your brain, your neighbour cannot make people’s heads explode, and the chance of a freak transporter accident fusing you with a fly is remarkably low. But how much do we really know about the people all around us? How sure can you be that they’ve never killed a man, that they don’t have a past littered with unpleasant secrets and gruesome deeds. Sure, they may seem like the nice normal type, happy to take their turn getting the drinks in and chatting about their weekend, but what are they really up to?
Which is not to say that this is a horror movie – it’s most definitely not. The motif of “What if the guy next door is a serial killer?” has been done to death, after all. There are a few unpleasant moments, but underneath it all it’s a psychological drama – and the fact that it’s played firmly as real life means it has more of an emotional impact.
9/10
ObQuote: You should ask Tom... how come he's so good at killing people?
Review:
If there’s one thing that’s remained constant in the works of David Cronenberg it’s his fascination with what lies just underneath the skin, and his horror at what might break through at any moment.
In much of his earlier work this is literal – people are physically transformed from the ordinary into the other, their flesh warping as their minds fracture, their physical selves changed to mirror the unpleasantness underneath. What clearly comes out of his films is that here is a man who is scared of the possibilities of human emotion, and of the terrible things that could be hiding just behind the masks of normality all around us.
A History of Violence continues this theme, and although it drops the SFnal elements that make metaphor physical, in many ways the transformation is all the more scary because of it. When it comes right down to it, you can wander out of early Cronenberg sure that parasites are not going to warp your brain, your neighbour cannot make people’s heads explode, and the chance of a freak transporter accident fusing you with a fly is remarkably low. But how much do we really know about the people all around us? How sure can you be that they’ve never killed a man, that they don’t have a past littered with unpleasant secrets and gruesome deeds. Sure, they may seem like the nice normal type, happy to take their turn getting the drinks in and chatting about their weekend, but what are they really up to?
Which is not to say that this is a horror movie – it’s most definitely not. The motif of “What if the guy next door is a serial killer?” has been done to death, after all. There are a few unpleasant moments, but underneath it all it’s a psychological drama – and the fact that it’s played firmly as real life means it has more of an emotional impact.
9/10
ObQuote: You should ask Tom... how come he's so good at killing people?
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Date: 2005-10-10 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 08:31 pm (UTC)Like, say Glengarry Glen Ross.