http://www.criticsrant.com/archive/2007/09/21/EASTERN-PROMISES-The-Latest-Step-In-An-Auteurs-Evolution.aspx 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. en-US Critics Rant info@criticsrant.com Subtext Version 1.9.4.0 http://www.criticsrant.com/images/default_gravatar_bullhorn.png http://www.criticsrant.com/archive/2007/09/21/EASTERN-PROMISES-The-Latest-Step-In-An-Auteurs-Evolution.aspx 77 60