VIGILANTE thriller A History Of Violence may have been taken from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke but it has become a quintessential David Cronenbourg film and one of his best.

The Canadian director, best known for horror films such as The Fly and Scanners, has spliced elements of film noir, westerns and Hitchcock with his own recurring themes of doubles, a questionable reality and plenty of graphic violence.

The film is a masterclass of honed thrills, a lean 90 minutes of gripping drama.

Viggo Mortensen plays Tom Stall, a happily married father-of-two who as a cafe owner is a well known member of a very friendly little town in America's Mid West.

One evening his cafe is visited by a couple of ruthless criminals who have seemingly been robbing and murdering their way around the country.

However, their attempts to leave with the cafe takings are foiled by Stall who shoots them both dead.

He is hailed as a local hero by the townspeople but there are some surprised by Stall's skills in despatching the men.

One not surprised is mob boss Carl Fogarty (played by the excellent as ever Ed Harris) who visits the cafe from Philadelphia where he swears he knew Stall as Joey Cusack a hit man who was responsible for the gruesome scar on the side of his face.

Stall is drawn into violence once again when Fogarty comes for his revenge and he has to protect his beautiful lawyer wife (played by Maria Bello) and children, who are also beginning to doubt his story.

Cronenbourg and Mortensen said at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where A History Of Violence was criminally overlooked for the Palme D'Or, that the film was a comment on the violence breeding violence of US President George Bush's foreign policy.

Without such knowledge, though, the film exists as a powerful, and, bizarrely, at times quite funny revenge drama.

Cronenbourg treats his characters with a dry detachment.

Just as the characters are dwarfed by the Mid West setting's big sky, the director looks at the character's plight from a distance as befits the deadpan title.

There is little in the way of examination or reflection on behalf of the characters.

Rather we see Mortensen's tranquil existence blown away in bursts of bloody violence.

Though the director uses the violence sparingly there still remains his emetic obsession with body disfigurement one of Fogarty's heavies has his nose punched to pieces by Stall.

The last third of the film has a dreamlike quality as Stall lets his alter ego take over as he goes to find the only man who can bring an end to the violence.

This sequence heralds the arrival of William Hurt in a film-stealing cameo as Cusack's brother.

His mixture of menace and befuddlement during a stand-off in his palatial Philadelphia mansion is a delight.

The leads are also excellent with Mortensen calling up a striking stillness to his role.

He has a touching chemistry with Bello, whose relationship, as befits a Cronenbourg film, has a kinky sexual element.

The potential split in their intimacy threatens to be one of the most horrific things Cronenbourg has filmed.

By Mark Edwards