"Promises" To Keep

Eastern Promises (directed by David Cronenberg)

You can accuse David Cronenberg of a lot of things, but you can't say that he's gone soft. His latest film, Eastern Promises, is just as unsettling as any of his previous ones, which range from the 1988 Jeremy Irons doppelganger classic Dead Ringers to the autoeroticism of Crash (1996).

It's true that a lot of Cronenberg's films are violent, Promises being no exception, but he deals with it in a way that is dissimilar to other directors. Every act of violence is seen as a truly horrific event, and he forces you to focus on the grotesque images, not particularly for the pure sake of shocking, but to show the full extent of evil that is capable within humans.

Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a midwife living in London, is suddenly sucked into the Russian underworld when a teenaged girl hemorrhages and dies giving birth to her daughter. Of particular concern is the diary the deceased girl has on her, which Anna brings home to her uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski) to translate.

It doesn't take long for the Vory V Zakone crime family, led by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), to get their hands on the journal, as Anna needs to find a living relative to hand the baby over to.

This is Viggo Mortensen's second film with Cronenberg, the first being 2005's History of Violence, but this time, the collaboration is even more fruitful and Mortensen completely disappears into the role of Nikolai, who gently insists throughout the film that he is "just a driver" for the Zakone family.

Such an assertion arouses supicions right off the bat, because Nikolai has a dark grace about him that is different than the pure ugliness of Semyon's son Kirill, played with wonderful nastiness by French actor Vincent Cassel.

Promises is similar to Violence in the fact that Nikolai is a mysterious character, but to say any more than that would be ruining the film. What is worth mentioning is the already legendary bath house scene, where Mortensen has to fight for his life in the buff against two brutal gangsters. By the end of the sequence, there's a feeling that you've just witnessed a new landmark in the history of movie fights.

Promises is a great film, and it confirms Cronenberg's place among the very best of directors.