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‘Eastern Promises’ well kept
Cronenberg’s newest shocks and entertains
By Alex Rewey
The film immediately sets up crime drama clichés, then surely and often without warning, betrays them in true Cronenberg fashion.
“Eastern Promises” is the latest “wolf in sheep’s clothing” film by the budding cinematic partnership between director David Cronenberg and leading man Viggo Mortensen. This follows close on the heels of their previous work, “A History of Violence,” whose title alone so aptly describes their new film as well.
“Eastern Promises” begins with a horrific act of violence, followed closely by the birth of child to an underage Russian girl. These two sparks set in motion an unstoppable sequence of events located in modern-day London.
Naomi Watts plays Anna, a midwife to the birth of the Russian child, who is left deciphering the young mother’s diary after her death. The only other clue is a business card found inside the diary for a local Russian restaurant/mafia headquarters run by Semyon, played by the restrained, yet terrifying Armin Mueller-Stahl.
It is here that Anna meets the soft-spoken moral conundrum, Nikolai (Mortensen), a driver and occasional muscle for Semyon’s less than stellar son Kirill, played effortlessly by Vincent Cassel.
The film immediately sets up crime drama clichés, then surely and often without warning, betrays them in true Cronenberg fashion. Cronenberg has a tremendous gift for storytelling, as the viewer seems to find out the plot at the same time the characters do.
The shocking conclusion sneaks up almost entirely unnoticed.
Anna delves deeper in deeper into Nikolai’s world of violence and secrets, where the mysteriously pervasive tattoos are a language in and of themselves, telling one’s whole life story back to the old country.
At first the story appears fairly routine, but as the film progresses, performances become mesmerizing. Mortensen’s superbly menacing acting, combined with Cronenberg’s precision directing make even something as simple as taking a slip of paper from Nikolai’s hands seem like a diabolical Faustian pact.
Nikolai is likable, yet intimidating, and just as his many tattoos appear to lurk and creep up under his expensive and pristine English suit, his calm demeanor doesn’t quite entirely hide his capability of squirm-inducing violence.
Much like Cronenberg and Mortensen’s previous endeavor, the violence in “Eastern Promises” is shocking in its realism; a truly horrible and visceral experience to behold. The instantly infamous bathhouse fight sequence is honestly one of the more engrossing and nauseating things one’s likely to see in a mainstream release.
It’s on a level of viciousness perhaps only rivaled by the knife-fight to the death near the end of “Saving Private Ryan,” where afterwards the viewers feel as exhausted and permanently changed as the characters do.
Nevertheless, “Eastern Promises” delivers an excellent study in the tortures, agonies and injustices that can exist behind the closed doors and zipped lips of the modern “civilized” world, and just how far some people will go to keep them hidden.
The characters are well drawn and transcend expectations. Visually, London appears perfectly damp, dark and drearily filmed for this classic, yet disturbingly contemporary immigrant story gone horribly, horribly wrong.
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