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Throughout these performances something chameleonic about Mortensen as an actor materialises. There\u2019s a\u00a0softness to the way he carries himself as Tom Stall and yet, when he plays the Russian mobster Nikolai in\u00a0<\/span>Eastern Promises<\/i>, his features seem sharper and more threatening. That sense of a\u00a0changed self desperately clawing towards the surface plays out through more internal ways in each story; the gradual encroachment of Tom\u2019s old life in Philly on his quiet, suburban existence is defined by the idea that the killer Joey Cusack is asleep somewhere deep inside him, waiting to be woken up. As Carl Foggarty, a\u00a0man from his past, insists to Edie, \u200b\u201c<\/span>I know what\u2019s inside him, what makes him tick. He\u2019s still the same guy.\u201d Tom\u2019s tragedy is that this might be true; the moment before he strikes his son, he insists \u200b\u201c<\/span>in this family, we don\u2019t solve our problems by hitting people,\u201d but violence still pours out of\u00a0him.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Meanwhile Nikolai\u2019s identity (something that reads as static at the beginning of\u00a0<\/span>Eastern Promises)<\/i> is bound up in his body, his inner conflict simmering beneath the surface as the camera pays close, intimate attention to the tattoos that cover him \u2013 symbols of his place within the hierarchy of the Russian mob. Going one further, the film\u2019s iconic fistfight in the public baths sees Mortensen bare all. We see all the things that make up Nikolai\u2019s physical condition \u2013 his muscles, his bruises, his tattoos \u2013 and recognise that these are all symbols of something that he no longer wants to\u00a0be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tom and Nikolai are characters who exist in an uncertain space; not only are they haunted by the past, but they seem to live in fear of what lies beyond their established sense of self. At the end of\u00a0<\/span>A\u00a0History of Violence<\/i>, this fear is infectious, having taken root in the rest of the Stall family and the literal darkness of the home that Tom returns to, whereas in\u00a0<\/span>A\u00a0Dangerous Method<\/i>, it\u2019s more rooted in the individual. Freud grapples with his gradual loss of authority over the world of psychoanalysis (and Jung specifically), although the idea that Freud\u2019s ideas are dying is also manifested through his body when he collapses at an academic conference. This uncertainty also manifests in Mortensen\u2019s performances \u2013 in\u00a0<\/span>Eastern Promises\u00a0<\/i>as Nikolai reads the diary of a\u00a0teenage girl who died giving birth to the child of one of his criminal contemporaries, he\u2019s always alone, dimly lit. There\u2019s a\u00a0tension at the core of Viggo\u2019s acting; Nikolai is shown to be a\u00a0character who never knows exactly how much genuine emotion he\u2019s able to display, constantly seeming to fear surveillance both from the mob that he exists within and the outside forces keeping a\u00a0close eye on him. Nikolai\u2019s sense of self exists in a\u00a0fundamentally uncertain place, fluctuating between something real and something performed. Compounding this uncertainty, the characters Viggo plays often find themselves standing on a\u00a0threshold at the end of these films: between duty and power in\u00a0<\/span>Eastern Promises<\/i>, or life and death in\u00a0<\/span>Crimes of the Future<\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Crimes of the Future\u00a0<\/i>is the Mortensen and Cronenberg collaboration that has the most in common with the director\u2019s earlier genre-defining body horror films, and yet, despite its focus on physical transformation and the threat of regulation on non-normative bodies (as in\u00a0<\/span>Videodrome\u00a0<\/i>or\u00a0<\/span>The Fly<\/i>), the film feels like an evolution of the relationship between star and director. The small and powerful transformations in Mortensen\u2019s physicality \u2013 Saul is all tension and nervous tics, his body literally at war with him as it mutates and grows new organs \u2013 anchor a\u00a0character study of someone who doesn\u2019t know how to die\u00a0yet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mortensen\u2019s characters in these films all feature moments where they exist for other characters to project something onto them (the way Tom performs suburban life and Freud becoming an abstract object in Jung\u2019s dream) but nowhere is this clearer than in the violent spectacles of performance that foregrounds Saul\u2019s changing body and the constant ways in which he\u2019s made and remade anew. A\u00a0similar observation comes in\u00a0<\/span>A\u00a0History of Violence<\/i>, as Tom tries to explain his former life as Joey to his wife, he confesses to her, \u200b\u201c<\/span>I wasn\u2019t really born again until I\u00a0met you.\u201d The often tragic uncertainty of these characters is that rebirth alone never seems to be enough.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n