Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a quiet and peaceful man. The small town family man is living the quintessential American Dream. He’s married to a successful and loving lawyer, Edie (Maria Bello), has two adoring children, high school student Jack (Ashton Holmes) and preschooler Sarah (Heidi Hayes), and runs a popular diner and coffee shop right down on Main Street. All is good, so perfect Tom can’t imagine things ever getting better.

He’s right, as the husband and father’s idyllic Shangri-La is shattered with the arrival of two thugs meaning to do him and his patrons deadly harm. But before anything can happen, Tom takes action and dispatches the murderers with brutally swift ingenuity, becoming a local hero and national celebrity in the blink of an eye. But fame comes at a price, Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) coming to town believing Tom is the brother of a renowned Philadelphian named Richie Cusack (William Hurt) and is responsible for taking out his eye with a piece of barbed wire. He’s mistaken, of course, but that doesn’t mean the entire Stall family isn’t in any less danger.

Based on the acclaimed graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke and working from a screenplay by Josh Olson, “A History of Violence” is easily David Cronenberg’s most accessible and audience-friendly feature since “The Fly.” That doesn’t make it one of his best, “Dead Ringers,” “Naked Lunch” and “Spider” hold the top spots there, it’s just that it is his easiest to comprehend since that gooey 1986 classic sci-fi remake. Even then, this is still a morally complex potboiler sure to unsettle and perplex audiences, Cronenberg daring to ask tough questions about family, faith, love and the after effects of violence many are sure to find distasteful.

This is still an astonishingly stirring thriller made for people willing to take the time to ponder everything the director fearlessly brings to the surface. Meticulously scripted and acted, Cronenberg elevates the stakes little by little, slowly leading viewers into a Hitchcockian netherworld of mistaken identity before exploding that scenario into a damning spiral of depraved inhumanity from which there is no escape. This is a nasty, brutish turn of events, one that drives into the very heart of Tom’s family, ripping to shreds everything he has worked so hard to build.  Worse, it’s all his fault.

So much in Cronenberg’s oeuvre is obsessed with reality, trying to decipher it from fantasy and then vice versa. Throughout his career, this idea that fantasy, the little lies we tell ourselves to make it through the day, can be far more potent than the actual things going on around us is what continually makes the director and his movies tick. The danger, of course, is to become lost in those little white lies, trapped in the world they create for eternity and, like the protagonists in “Rabid,” “The Fly,” “Dead Ringers,” “Videodrome” and “eXistenZ,” spending too much time there leading to doom.

It’s the same here, but the fantasy in “A History of Violence” isn’t some William S. Burroughs’ psychedelic virtual reality, it’s the American Dream. A good job, a nice house, a loving family, all of it a lie when violence – not just physical – takes hold. Lying is a type of violence, too, psychological warfare that even under the best and most heartfelt circumstances will only lead to insecure uncertainty engulfing everyone. To Cronenberg, this violence is the damning one, the one to fear, the inability to be honest with both ourselves and our loved ones the thing that will ultimately rain devastation upon a family.

Don’t misunderstand; this movie is far from perfect. Much of it is far too neat, too tidy for my comfort. Tom hits the national airwaves as a hero and yet only one reporter comes to his home after he returns from the hospital. Known mafia men come and go mysteriously and, even though the local sheriff is on the case, no one ever thinks to phone the FBI and have them watched. After more men end up dead, this time on Tom’s front lawn, not a single reporter or newsman shows up even though this time the people dispatched are far more famously heinous than those sent to the morgue at the diner.

There is plenty like this that refuses to add up. Luckily, so much about “A History of Violence” is so stirring these flaws end up not mattering quite as much as they could. The acting is universally strong, particularly Oscar-caliber turns by Mortensen and Bello each subtly exchanging roles as things develop. Both Harris and Hurt add undeniable menace, the latter standing out for his strangely surreal combination of whimsy and malevolence taking the picture into a strange third act showdown I didn’t see coming. Howard Shore’s thrilling score ands just the right menacing touch, while Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography ranks with some of the best and most effortless I’ve seen this year. The kids are awful, however, both Holmes and Hayes slightly perplexing annoyances grinding things to a halt every time they’re onscreen.

Still, much of this is far too remarkable to dwell on the negative. Cronenberg continues to be a filmmaker willing to push boundaries and ask tough questions others don’t just shy away from, they sprint in fear. “A History of Violence” is no different. It is an unsettling journey full of the director’s trademark blood and gore (a bullet-riddled headshot is particularly gruesome), and yet it’s most unsettling journey has virtually nothing to do with either and is far more internal. No, that journey might be the most perverse and uncomfortable of them all; a journey to a sacred place called home.

Film Rating: êêê  (out of 4)