Throughout most of his career, David Cronenberg twisted moviegoers into knots by exploring their fears of losing control, particularly when it came to one’s body. Such shenanigans spawned masterpieces of the macabre, from the exploding heads of Scanners to an even-creepier-than-usual Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, but too often, Cronenberg’s thematic obsessions overwhelmed his storytelling.
Then came 2005’s A History of Violence, and it seemed Cronenberg had reached a perfect fusion of nightmare and narrative. That muse served him again in Eastern Promises, a taut crime thriller that re-teams the director with his Violence star, Viggo Mortensen.
The tale begins in London with the birth of a baby girl and the death of her 14-year-old mother, a heroin-addicted Russian prostitute who bleeds to death on the operating table. A hospital midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), takes home the deceased girl’s diary, hoping it can lead her to any surviving relatives. That search leads Anna to a Russian-owned restaurant and its grandfatherly proprietor, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), whom she asks to translate the diary’s Russian text.
Bad move. Semyon runs London’s Russian mafia, and the diary is chock full of tawdry details about the depravity of Semyon and his volatile son Kiril (Vincent Cassel). Meanwhile, Anna digs deeper into the dead girl’s turbulent past, finding herself immersed in an underworld of drug addiction, rape and murder. Semyon cannot abide this amateur sleuthing, and so he dispatches his chauffeur, Nikolai (Mortensen), to take care of Anna and her irascible Russian uncle (Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski), who has also read the incriminating diary.
Revealing more would spoil the film’s tantalizing mysteries. Eastern Promises is shrouded in mystery, layers of them, between which Anna (and, by extension, the audience) glimpses the darkest of cruelties. Such revelations are not surprising when you consider the screenwriter, Steven Knight, explored similar terrain in 2002’s excellent Dirty Pretty Things.
Knight’s script is well-served by the director. With a measured pace and ominous tone, Cronenberg’s storytelling has never been stronger. His approach here is not showy, but rather elegantly classical. Cronenberg still allows himself a showstopper of a set piece: At a bathhouse, a disrobed Nikolai is attacked by a pair of Chechen goons.
Cronenberg is assisted by an exceptional cast. Mueller-Stahl deftly mixes charm and menace, and Cassel has a solid turn as a psycho with a hair-trigger temper. Watts might have the most modest role in the bunch, but she is disarmingly effective.
Then there is Mortensen. His cool self-assuredness gives Nikolai a dangerous and enigmatic edge. Like the demimonde of characters who populate Eastern Promises, there is no clear reading on Nikolai’s motives or leanings. Such ambiguity only adds to his charisma.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 