Eastern Promises Review

Now, I haven't seen all of David Cronenberg's films, but I've seen enough (The Fly, Dead Ringers, Spider, Scanners) to go into them expecting an eventual descent into madness and/or grotesquery.

So when I reached the point in both his new film, Eastern Promises, and his last one, A History of Violence, when it becomes clear that the plot is wrapping up without anyone's head exploding, it feels abrupt. They're both excellent movies, of course, but the Cronenberg that makes taught, gritty thrillers and not venereal psychedelic freak-outs will take some getting used to.

This film begins with a mystery: an unidentified, pregnant Russian teenager is rushed into Naomi Watts’ maternity ward hemorrhaging blood, and dies as they manage to save her baby. Watts takes a diary from her purse, and the search for the baby’s family ultimately leads her into a world of shadowy Russian gangsters and forced prostitution.

Viggo Mortensen re-teams with Cronenberg to play the most calm, collected, and efficient of said Russian gangsters, bucking for position against Vincent Cassel’s bipolar psycho. Ultimately we start to suspect he hides a tender heart behind a ruthless visage.

Eastern Promises never quite raises the stakes any higher than the intrigue of the beginning, and the plot spends much of its time building toward two plot twists that aren’t terribly difficult to see coming. But the exploration of the real-life Russian immigrant underworld, the agents of oppressed criminality now operating in free world, is compelling viewing enough, if only for Mortensen’s trademark intensity and the complex system of prison tattoos he sports. The film culminates in one of the rawest (and nakedest) fight scenes in recent memory.

The diary of the dead girl keeps recurring in the film as a seemingly poignant voice over, echoing the sympathy that doe-eyed Audrey Tatou wins in screenwriter Steven Kinght’s Dirty Pretty Things, a similar grim tale of immigrants in London’s underbelly. But the sentimentality of the hopeful Russian immigrant girl (and inspiration, I assume, for the title “Eastern Promises”) doesn’t particularly mesh with the hard-nosed ins and outs of the movie itself, and the girl’s voice is mostly a distracting ghost.

But that’s the only off note in a movie with a lot to like, especially the performances: Mortensen can act by only moving his eyebrows, Watts is solid as usual, and nobody plays crazy like Vincent Cassel.

And of course there’s some brutal gangworld knifework, spilling plenty of Cronenberg’s trademark bright-red blood. Definitely not a film for the weak of heart.

Even if nobody’s head explodes.
When to See It: Before It Leaves Theaters