By Kofi Outlaw

The first five minutes of Eastern Promises immediately plunges you into the sordid, not-for-the-squeamish world of famed director and auteur David Cronenberg. The film opens with a brutal throat slashing (throat hacking, rather) and a mysterious pregnant girl, bruised and beaten, collapsing in a pharmacy with blood hemorrhaging from her womb. Next we see the newborn babe, still slathered in bloody embryonic fluids, lying on a hospital table fighting for air from the respirator over her face. It’s five minutes of some of the more horrifying, perturbing, gross and moving imagery seen on film recently, and it indicates why David Cronenberg’s name is beginning to transcend the cult world, finding mention amongst of today’s most lauded directors.

In this latest outing Cronenberg guides us into London’s seedy underbelly, where crime syndicates still operate according to savagely archaic codes of order and retribution and where the slave trade (young immigrant girls specifically,) is still a reality. If this latter part echoes familiar, it’s because Steven Knight, the scribe of 2002’s similarly themed Dirty Pretty Things wrote the script.

The plot is set in motion when Anna (Naomi Watts,) a midwife at the hospital where the mystery girl’s child is born, takes the diary of the baby’s mother, who has died in childbirth. We learn that Anna herself has recently miscarried, so she has an almost maternal need to see to it that the child end up in the loving care of family, rather than become another child turned over to the harsh care of the state.

The diary is written entirely in Russian, so to help uncover the details she needs to find the baby’s next-of-kin, Anna employs the help of her mother (Sinéad Cusack) and Russian immigrant Uncle to translate the text. Upon reading the initial pages, Anna’s uncle warns her to abandon this quest; the dead girl was a prostitute mixed up with an infamous and dangerous local Russian mob. He warns that contact with such people can only leave a stain upon their lives. Anna, of course, ignores her Uncle’s warning and speeds off on her motorbike to meet trouble, head on.


A business card stashed in the diary leads her to a Russian family’s restaurant, owned by patriarch Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl, brilliantly portraying an old wolf who slips in and out of sheep’s clothing.) Semyon is wholly disinterested with Anna’s account of the dead prostitute and her baby—that is until Anna makes mention of the diary and her plan to have it translated. With lupine guile, Semyon lures Anna with the promise to help her translate the text, subtly procuring details of her life—where she lives, where she works, where in Russia her family hails from. When she returns to meet Semyon a second time, his increased pressure to secure the diary tips Anna off that the dangers her uncle warned of might be closer than she thinks. She makes paltry excuses to distance herself from Semyon and his family, but by then it is too late: she has stared too far into the abyss, and, as Nietzsche warned, the abyss is now staring back at her.

On the way out of her meeting Anna runs across Semyon’s son, the vile and volatile Kirill (Vincent Cassel, gleefully channeling the role he played in Derailed) and his partner, the unnervingly stoic Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen, wisely teaming with Cronenberg for a second outing.) Nikolai and Kirill have just returned from gruesomely dismembering and disposing of a corpse (the throat-hacked victim from the opening of film,) setting into motion a second plotline involving a rival mob, which will eventually intersect—with dire consequences—the primary thread involving the child and the diary. During this initial meeting Anna and Nikolai spark a connection, staring a bit too long at one another and from there the deadly game of cat-and-mouse is officially afoot.

This movie is far from mob-procedural 101 however—the story remains tightly focused on the shifting relationships between its central characters, Anna, Semyon, Kirill and the mysterious Nikolai, who Mortensen portrays (with an impeccable Russian accent) as a complexly layered man of sharp cunning, prone to quiet pangs of moral guilt, yet who is simultaneously apt at committing acts of unspeakable violence. If you haven’t already heard talk of the bathhouse fight scene involving a naked Mortensen and two rival mobsters, hold on to your seat. The scene, some seven minutes in length, is a potential classic and thoroughly establishes the line between the over-the-top indulgences of the summer movie blockbuster and those truly great achievements in cinema still reserved for the fall/winter season.

I wont give away the multiple twists that occur to bring the plot of Eastern Promises around to its abrupt climax, (which is sure to polarize viewers.) What I will say is that Cronenberg, working off Knight’s subtle, yet intricately woven script, does a bang-up job of thwarting expectation in unfolding the story: loyalties are never what they seem, nor do the characters land exactly where we expect their arcs to take them. Again, such departure from genre conventions is sure to polarize viewers, but I doubt any will be able to refute Cronenberg’s achievement in crafting a view of London totally alien to the city we think we know, as well as prompting fantastic performances from his cast. Even relative unknown Jerzy Skolimowski turns in a notable performance as Anna’s cantankerous uncle, stealing every scene he is in, even those with acting heavyweight Mortensen.


Gruesome violence or unsettling imagery have never exactly been foreign elements to any David Cronenberg film (Scanners, or The Fly anyone?) In recent years, however, the director has tempered his eccentric style for horror, rounding it out with a sharp eye for the light which accompanies the dark in the human soul, a fact first showcased in his last offering, 2005’s A History of Violence, also starring Mortensen. In Eastern Promises Cronenberg continues to develop into a masterful director with a deft hand for conveying the story-beneath-the-story, as well as an eye able to pierce the inner workings of criminals, killers and those generally walking the razor’s edge. With Eastern Promises, you too will be thankful to be on the journey with him, as he only seems to be getting better with time, just like good Vodka.