- The Guardian,
- Friday February 22 2008
David Cronenberg follows his dissertation on American gangsters, A History of Violence, with a claustrophobic and occasionally brutal thriller about Russian organised crime in London - a topical theme after the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko which, Cronenberg explains in a short feature, happened halfway through the shoot.
Viggo Mortensen, almost unrecognisable, is a key actor in both films and in a neat piece of circularity, his next film is directed by Ed Harris, the sinister hitman of the earlier movie. In an ambivalent role, the Oscar-nominated Mortensen is outstanding in an intriguing, but unbalanced film, with midwife Naomi Watts and her home life providing an underwhelming counterpoint to the far more compelling affairs of Russian restaurateur and underworld boss Armin Muller-Stahl, his loose cannon son (the versatile Vincent Cassel) and Mortensen as their driver.
The plot is a cunning one - it relates to a diary left by a teenage mother who dies in childbirth, providing dangerous implications and also to these Russian gangsters' habit of tattooing themselves as a means of proving their rank in the organisation, a key plot aspect which came out of Mortensen's own research. This is coupled satisfyingly with another unconventional view of hidden London by screenwriter Steven Knight, who explored similar themes in Dirty Pretty Things.
Cronenberg has never been one to shrink from gore, especially when it's body-related. Eastern Promises begins with a shockingly realistic throat-slitting and includes a savage bathhouse fight in which a nude Mortensen attempts to foil two clothed killers, helping it earn an 18 certificate: there's no softening of Cronenberg's fierce modus operandi on the horizon and after the underrated Spider, his two British-set movies have been well up to his usual high standard.
