David Cronenberg has designed a nifty prismatic shell for his new movie, “A History of Violence.” Considered from one angle, it looks like an exercise in the style of ironic neo-noir practiced by the Coen Brothers; all lean, steely craftsmanship booby-trapped with sly jokes and crazy blasts of violence. From another angle, it scans like a neo-Western that’s been tricked up in the manner of “Far From Heaven,” with John Ford providing the template rather than Douglas Sirk. Turn it over again, so that the light hits nothing but the storytelling basics, and it’s a gripping suspense picture – weird around the edges to be sure, but as clever and satisfying a thrill ride as “Red Eye.”

“A History of Violence” is, in the least unburdened of terms, a super-cool, rapid-fire, brilliantly propulsive genre coup. Mr. Cronenberg’s development from the maker of “Shivers” to the maestro of “Spider” is one of the most enthralling intellectual adventures in all of cinema, but it’s also the story of awkward formal intuition evolving into supremely disciplined craftsmanship. Brought to bear on a swift little genre exercise, his classical mastery of the movie-making nuts-and-bolts – shot and cut, light and sound, performance and effect – creates whiplash excitement.

But rotate “A History of Violence” to one last facet and you’ll discover, slightly ajar, the lid of a Pandora’s Box stuffed with all kinds of nasty psychological imps, philosophical hobgoblins, and spooky, big-eyed enigmas.

The story unfolds in a hallucination known as Millbrook, Ind., where present-day small town America appears to have fused DNA with Norman Rockwell paintings, Nicholas Ray films, and the 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s “Picture Book.” On the main street of Millbrook (and I bet it’s called “Main Street”), you’ll find a post office, a police station, a general store, and a diner run by mild mannered Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen).

“A History of Violence” will be the story of how Tom defends his family from a group of “bad men.” The first are a pair of black-clad outlaws who roll through town on a random crime spree. Chance (or is it fate?) drops them at the door of Tom’s friendly diner, and they mosey on in for coffee, pie, the contents of the cash register, and the honor of a terrified waitress.

Tom springs into action with spectacular savoir faire, disarming the crisis with a jaw dropping (and jaw-obliterating) command of physical violence. Bye-bye bad guys; hello, local hero. Tom’s amazing grace under pressure is celebrated in the media, which has the unfortunate consequence of luring a second set of villains to the scene. Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) and his posse of Irish gangsters have driven all the way from Philadelphia fueled by the conviction that Tom Stall is, in fact, the notorious Joey Cusack. The same Joey Cusack who betrayed his crime family; the same Joey Cusack who tore up the left side of Fogarty’s mug with barbed wire; the same lethal killing machine who vanished without a trace over 15 years ago.

A coffee carafe to the head is not going to fix this problem.

Things build to a showdown at the Stall family homestead in a scenario that wouldn’t (at first) be out of place in a 50-year-old John Wayne picture: Tom on the porch, shotgun in hand, with his wife, Edie (Maria Bello), teenage son, Jack (Ashton Holmes), and young daughter, Sarah (Heidi Hayes), cowering around the rocking chair. An angry fly buzzes against an upstairs windowpane; connoisseurs of the Cronenberg oeuvre will find their imaginations stirring with memories of his spliced-identity masterpiece “The Fly.”

I’ve barely sketched in the first half hour of the plot, but everything that follows is off-limits. As usual, Mr. Cronenberg has engineered a delivery system for conundrums, and the particular paradox that motors “A History of Violence” would be sabotaged by full plot disclosure. The question of whether Tom Stall is, or ever was Joey Cusack is crucial to the movie, but it’s easy to get tripped up taking a Cronenberg film too literally. This isn’t a movie about a mystery of identity; it’s a movie about the mystery of identity.

What happens when people look each other in the eye? Who – what – do they see? Everything in “A History of Violence” is structured around the exchange of loaded looks: between husband and wife, father and son, past and present, audience and spectacle. Twist the prism again, and you could see the entire movie as a refraction of that famously ineffable scene in “Au Hasard Balthazar” where a beast of burden meets the deep, blank stares of other animals penned up in a circus.

What sort of cage are these people in? As you watch “A History of Violence,” it’s worth remembering that reality is always virtual in a Cronenberg picture – whether explicitly so in “Videodrome,” “eXistenZ,” and “Naked Lunch,” conceptually so in “Crash” and the early body horror classics (“Shivers,” “The Brood”), or posited as ontologically such in “Spider,” his great study of tragic consciousness.

Life in “A History of Violence” is no different, but this time around there’s an unmistakable political subtext to the imitation of life in Millbrook. Josh Olson’s shrewd, sturdy script (salvaged from a marginally interesting graphic novel and further tweaked by Mr. Cronenberg) is littered with dialogue that suggest affinities between Tom and President Bush – none of which can be quoted here without disclosing secrets.

Or take this crucial scene: One afternoon, believing that Fogarty is about to come terrorize his family, Tom calls in a homeland-security alert to Edie. The second it turns out to be a false alarm, Mom puts down the shotgun, turns to her daughter, and says, “Let’s go shopping.” This is allegory of diamond density and brilliance.

“A History of Violence”: the very title guides us to consider the big picture. The Christian God looms large in Stall family values.(In a movie stripped of all unnecessary detail, the crucifix around Tom’s neck blazons significance.) Guns are a big thing too. Completing the holy trinity of American political bugaboos, there might even be a gay. Jack behaves an awful lot like your prototypical high school closet case – an ambiguity, intentional or not, that scintillates across all the tensions of the film.

Mr. Cronenberg could care less about scoring cheap shots off the red states from his vantage point in liberal Toronto (the movie was shot in Millbrook, Canada). There’s no sarcasm or derision here; “A History of Violence” is every bit a clinical analysis of psychopathology as “Crash.” The diagnosis is a bad case of cognitive dissonance, and the cancerous unease of societies that project a false narrative of themselves. That explains the ersatz American production design; Millbrook isn’t a location, it’s a dislocation.

“A History of Violence” rips through the zeitgeist, exposing the profound disconnect of our times – no one knew the storm was coming, right? Fifty years from now it won’t have aged a day. That’s one definition of a classic. Another is a movie so rich you can get to the end of a long review and realize how much has been left unsaid: the phenomenal focus of Mr. Mortensen and Ms. Bello’s performances; the intelligence of Howard Shore’s music and Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography; the presence of William Hurt. You’ll have to find out what he contributes to the best film of the year on your own.