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Promises truly brutal
By David Strungis
dstrungi@mscd.edu

David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a film steeped in culture and in blood. It looks unflinchingly at the sinister underworld of London’s Russian mafia gang Vory v Zakone and its expatriated Russian inhabitants.

The film opens with a brutal murder of a pregnant woman at a drugstore on Christmas Eve. She is whisked away to a hospital but dies during delivery. All that remains is her diary, which is written in Russian, and her baby girl.

The on-duty nurse Anna (Naomi Watts) is determined to find out who the woman is and why she was killed. Terrified that the baby will become another orphan trapped in an uncaring bureaucratic system, she uses her mother and her uncle to help translate the diary to find any living relations.

She follows a lead in the diary to a restaurant, a front for mob boss Semyon (Armin Mueller Stahl), his unstable son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen). Anna is soon sucked into a world she does not understand, dealing with men who kill at a moment’s notice to protect the world they have built.

Written by Steven Knight, Eastern Promises, like Knight’s Dirty Pretty Things, has great sympathy for the underclass, especially those trapped by poverty and forced into terrible situations. The film takes great care to make sure we see the pain of those trapped as sex slaves for the Vory. These scenes would be titillating and exploitive in a lesser film, but Cronenberg frames the shots and lets the camera linger so that we see their despair.

As a film about organized crime, it has rightfully earned comparisons to The Godfather as it is a contemplation of the characters, their traditions and their history. History is especially important to these characters who write it in tattoos. “If you don’t have tattoos, you don’t exist,” says a police officer as he investigates a body at the scene of the Vory’s latest crime.

Mortensen gives the strongest performance in the film and is excellent as the stoic and deadly Nikolai. His tattoos tell the story of a man who has seen so much death that he does not blink when he cuts fingers off of corpses. Mortensen gives one of the most brutal and revealing fight scenes in recent movie memory.

Cronenberg is a versatile director, having made low-budget horror movies (The Brood), classic sci-fi thrillers (The Fly), and existential mind-benders (Naked Lunch). However, his last two, History of Violence and Eastern Promises, have focused more explicitly on the act of violence and the men who commit it. Eastern Promises combines the dark and disturbing imagery that we come to expect of a Cronenberg film.