Review: Eastern Promises

* * * 1/2

Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen,Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinead Cusack. Written by Steven Knight. Directed by David Cronenberg. Rated R. 100 minutes. Focus Features.

A lonely London midwife inherits the diary of a deceased patient and unwittingly discovers deadly secrets about an organized Russian crime family in David Cronenberg’s visceral, gripping new thriller Eastern Promises, a bracing film that explores the inextricable link between birth and death, and rebirth.

When a fourteen-year-old Russian-born prostitute dies in childbirth, Anna (Naomi Watts) delivers a healthy baby girl and apparent orphan. The only clue to family lies in a Russian-scribed diary found on the corpse, sending curious Anna directly to the doorstop of the mob boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), restaurateur and father to reckless gangster Kirill (Vincent Cassel) and employer to stoic driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a mysterious figure who immediately recognizes Anna as out of her element though she herself does not.

Later translated by Anna’s crusty Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the diary chronicles a harrowing tale of sexual slavery, heroin addiction and lost innocence at the hands of the mob, eager to retrieve the journal and bury the implicating evidence. The danger for Anna is very clear, and where an ordinary person would disappear, she continues her relentless search for the truth behind the death, against the pleas of her reasonable aunt (Sinead Cusack, effective). The depressed survivor of her own miscarriage, Anna quickly develops surrogate feelings for the infant while inching tentatively toward priority-clouded Nikolai, himself moving deeper into the family and closer to danger.

Although Eastern Promises is foremost the story of a woman’s hunt to bring truth to light, the film functions more effectively as an exploration of the dark, here a primal world of men bound to family traditions, tattoo rituals, sexual and mob initiations, grisly executions, double-crosses and harbored sexuality. And as much considerable empathy as Watts engenders, there is no getting around the risible chemistry between Kirill and Nikolai, both actors gazing and gesturing suggestively to a surprising scene of power. Mortensen so effectively captures Nikolai’s part exploitation, part affection for troubled Kirill, playing a chemistry card whenever necessary, riding the line between fraud and feeling, that we are always uncertain where his heart and loyalty truly lies. In this world, women are either moral, middle-class good or fallen, underage whores. Ultimately, salvation is on Cronenberg’s mind in a surprisingly touching climactic encounter between the three leads, where justice is reckoned and redemption granted.

While a fresh Watts is somewhat limited by a mostly saintly role that calls upon her to be alternately brave and foolish, Mortensen, disappearing into a mysterious character diametrically opposed to his turn in Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, underplays, boasting a convincing Russian accent and detachment. Late in the film he lets loose in a meticulously brutal sequence where Cronenberg strips him bare (literally) of weapons and defenses while two thugs attempt to take him down in a men’s sauna, the actor slashed, bloodied, covered in tattoos and water, exploding in violence. And conversely, he offers a compellingly low-key induction rite into "the family" where he asserts, "I live in the zone all the time. I’m already dead." It is chilling, and both the actor and character hold their cards close to the vest.

And then there is the film’s bravura turn from Vincent Cassel, as the emotionally scarred, closeted thug Kirill. Cassel, the flamboyant, talented French actor who is always like bottled raw energy uncorked, really gets his hooks into Kirill’s tangled, complicated desires for fatherly, brotherly and romantic love. Cronenberg has discussed the script’s implications regarding Kirill’s hidden homosexuality, but how it informs Cassel’s performance, the actor manifesting self-loathing with aggressive posturing, testosto-caginess and finally, vulnerability, is a real rush.

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, the volume of the crime elements would undoubtedly be turned up and the complexities muted. And while Eastern Promises doesn’t rank with the best (The Brood, Videodrome, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence) of Cronenberg’s long career, it easily outclasses—and out-creeps—any thriller this year. Over thirty years making uncompromisingly bleak thrillers and Cronenberg still knows how to surprise with a line of dialogue about a dead child, or a simple shot of blood gushing from a wound. With his signature chilly precision and near-clinical look at the savagery of violence (both inside and outside) and the potential for renewal, Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a dark movie jewel.

-Lee Shoquist