The plot centers around Tom Stall, a hardworking family man who runs a diner in Millbrook, Indiana, a small Midwestern town reminiscent of Mayberry. One night, when two thugs try to rob his diner and rape one of his employees, Tom shoots and kills them in self-defense, and finds himself an overnight celebrity. The press labels him an “American hero,” and for awhile he can’t turn on the TV without hearing about his bravery. But Tom is deeply troubled about the ease with which he killed the two men, and what this means about his psyche.

Then, a menacing man with a glass eye shows up in town, calling Tom “Joey Cusack” and implying that he was once a hitman for a criminal organization in Philadelphia. At first, Tom stoutly denies these allegations, but after the man and his underlings threaten his family, Tom breaks down and admits that he was “Joey” in a former life. His wife, Edie, is understandably devastated by the news, and is only somewhat reassured by Tom’s insisting that he’s a changed man. Tom alludes to an event he calls “spen[ding] three years in the desert,” after which Joey “died” and the upright Tom Stall was born, phoenix-like, out of his ashes. However, as the threats to his family grow more severe, Joey re-emerges in a series of violent acts against the mobsters, and eventually Tom returns to Philadelphia to confront his past.

Initially, the film seems to be an exploration of the Jungian shadow side of the personality, the violent and dissolute “Joey” who lives, deeply repressed, inside all of us. Not only Tom but his wife and son prove to have a “Joey” within them as well. His son Jack, when provoked by a bully named Bobby Jordan at school, first tries to fend the guy off using verbal arguments and sarcasm. He recognizes Bobby’s insults for the inanities they are, and ironically concedes to them (“You think I’m a queer? Okay, I’m a queer, a girl, a pansy. I admit it. Are you happy now?”), in effect deconstructing bullyhood. Eventually, though, Bobby goes too far, and Jack snaps, pummeling him in a display of vicious prowess that shows he’s inherited his father’s aptitude for violence. Jack is a good kid, a smart kid who understands the stupidity inherent in violence and the forces behind it (“You’ve proven your alpha male status,” he says to Bobby at one point. “Beating me up would be beside the point.”), and yet even his intellect is no match for the “Joey” within.

The often-shocking violence portrayed in A History of Violence occurs against a backdrop that seems like a nostalgic fantasy of small-town America. Millbrook is the sort of place where the kindly sheriff knows everybody’s name and their business, and where the stores in the local “mall” sell a hodgepodge of gifts, crafts, and women’s shoes. You could leave your doors unlocked there. Tom’s family, too, is portrayed as ever-so-slightly saccharine: when little Sarah has a nightmare, Mom, Dad, and her teenage brother crowd into her room to comfort her. The exaggeration is a slight one—this isn’t Pleasantville (1998)—but it is there.

So, at first glance, Cronenberg seems to be saying that there’s something artificial about small-town innocence and happy nuclear families, and that the reality lies beneath—in the “Joey” part of everyone’s unconscious. For a time, the film reads like a more subdued version of Blue Velvet (1986).

But there’s a catch: the scenes when Joey leaps to life are ironized as much as the Millbrook ones. The criminals in Philadelphia seem to have taken their cues from every Mafia movie you’ve ever seen. The bosses speak with slow, menacing sarcasm while the thugs stand around waiting to get killed. Ritchie, the kingpin, lives in a house replete with dark paneling and subdued lighting that recalls Don Corleone’s office in The Godfather (1972). His dialogue is straight from an action film: “Isn’t there anything I can do?” Tom says to him at one point. Ritchie replies, “Yeah. You can die.” Cue the minions. Tom, too, dispatches his enemies action-hero style, taking out improbable numbers of them while not getting a scratch on him. And Cronenberg underscores these scenes with music that’s just a little too loud and a little too obvious (piercing strings for suspense, thudding drums for chases), constantly reminding the viewer of the movie-ness of his movie.

Since everything in the film is ironized, it’s hard to figure out what point Cronenberg’s trying to make. Is he saying that violence, when it erupts, is every bit as clichéd and culturally-conditioned as small-town innocence? Or is he claiming, contra Freud, that our unconscious drives are not any more “profound” than our waking lives, that they’re just one more facet of our existence? Or is he mocking our very attempts to make meaning out of movies, to insist that serious pictures should have messages? Perhaps he’s suggesting that message-finding itself is every bit as clichéd as the Mafia movies he satirizes. After all, make an unconventional, dissonant film and give it a title like A History of Violence, and you know the wheels of interpretation are going to click into motion as reviewers, thoughtful audience members, and cinema bloggers try to figure out what you’re saying. Try to pin down anything about this film and you run headfirst into irony and the film’s own awareness of itself. Criticism is a genre unto itself, bound by its own conventions, and perhaps that’s something Cronenberg is trying to call our attention to by making a movie so resistant to interpretation.