When midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) begins a routine investigation into the family of a woman who turns up unannounced and traumatised at her hospital only to die in childbirth, she uncovers an increasingly terrifying trail that leads to the heart of London's Russian mafia at a time of a brutal turf war with their Chechen counterparts. Chauffeur Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen on career-best form) is making a similar journey, only his ambition is to get further up the hierarchy, whose members mark their status with increasingly elaborate coded tattoos that are only bestowed on the officially favoured: the Russian equivalents of GoodFellas' "made men".
At first glance, it's not the kind of project you'd associate with Canadian horrormeister David Cronenberg (its portrait of London as a crime-ridden multicultural melting-pot has at least as much in common with Dirty Pretty Things, whose screenwriter it shares), but the ice-cool treatment of appalling atrocities quickly becomes unmistakable. Nikolai is first seen clinically disposing of a corpse's distinguishing features in a scene that leaves little to the imagination, and later on he has to fight for his life in a steam bath while naked and unarmed in a thrilling (and gruesome) set-piece that's surely destined for classic status.
An impressively eclectic cast includes Sinéad Cusack as Anna's worried mother, Armin Mueller-Stahl as the deceptively avuncular Russian patriarch andVincent Cassel as his dangerously hot-headed son Kirill, while the Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski contributes a memorable cameo as Anna's grizzled Russian uncle, whose well-informed pessimism about the situation proves all too prescient. However, it's the almost anthropological level of detail, not to mention the barely concealed homoerotic tension between gangland 'brothers' Nikolai and Kirill, that makes the film so riveting.
The first Cronenberg film shot entirely outside his native Toronto, he and his regular cinematographer Peter Suschitzky turn London into a dark and rainswept netherworld, made all the more unsettling for being so clearly recognisable. And the Cronenberg-Mortensen collaboration (first seen in A History of Violence) is rapidly becoming one of the most creatively fertile director-actor partnerships in modern cinema.
Cronenberg's London-set thriller stars Viggo Mortensen on career-best form as a Russian mobster whose only ambition is to pull himself up the mafia hierarchy, where status is marked with increasingly elaborate coded tattoos.
Eastern Promises is gruesome, gripping, with a wonderfully eclectic cast (including Sinead Cusack and Vincent Cassel), and features a breathtaking fight in a steam bath that's surely destined for classic status.
With his regular cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, Cronenberg turns London into a dark and rainswept netherworld, made all the more unsettling for being so clearly recognisable.
La Vie en Rose (2 discs)
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Eastern Promises
