Eastern Promises Review

David Cronenberg's latest starts with an explosion of violence as visually arresting and unsettling as anything you'll see this year. Immediately you are hooked into this grim tale set in an unfamiliar London where the old rubs against the new with startling consequences.

The film follows Naomi Watt's Anna, a midwife at Trafalgar Hospital, who finds herself the protector of a newborn baby girl after the underage mother dies in childbirth. It's the girl's journal, found on her person, that sets off a chain of events that leads to the very heart of the Russian mob. Her efforts to translate the journal, written entirely in Russian, brings her to the doorstep of Semyon, little realising that the old man is in fact a Don of the Vory V Zokone. It's here at Semyon's Tran-Siberian restaurant that Anna stumbles upon the crimes meted out to the deceased mother and ultimately those responsible. Only through the small graces of the driver and odd job man Nikolai (well cutting the fingers off a frozen corpse is a pretty odd job!), played with a stunning force my Viggo Mortensen, is it that Anna is able to cut to the heart of the Zokone.

This is an exceptional story told by a simply extraordinary filmmaker. Cronenberg's archetypes of body horror and identity are all present and correct, coursing through the veins of the film like a vital lifeblood. Viggo Mortensen is Oscar worthy here in what must be one of, if not, the most powerful male lead this year. His gentler moments as Nikolai belie a savagery that makes for the perfect counterpoint to Mortensen's good work with the character of Tom Stall in 2005's "A History of Violence". He is quickly becoming Cronenberg's muse. His performance here is perhaps so strong that it slightly unbalances the film. Watts is fine as Anna yet it is however Nikolai's captain, Kirill, played by "La Haine" star Vincent Cassel, that smacks of villainous pastiche when held up to Mortensen's creation.

Despite this, "Eastern Promises" is as good a film as any in Cronenberg's canon (high praise indeed) and could well be one of the finest examples of the gangster genre in recent years.