Eastern Promises

Having cemented his place in the hearts of cult fanatics, paying punters and considered academics alike, David Cronenberg returns with a new body-horror slash man-on-the-brink thriller. Essentially, Eastern Promises goes for the same buttons as its predecessor A History of Violence, although it doesn’t quite reach the latter’s well-imaged narrative and all-round postmodern panache.

Again the subject matter revolves around ganglands and families, although this time the gang is a family (the Russian Vory V Zakone mob), and the land is no longer small-town America but sprawling urban London. Penned by Stephen Knight – whose Dirty Pretty Things took a similar glance at the city’s underbelly – this is a grimy, drizzle-on-cobblestones type of London, where the colour of the night and the colour of the film stock commingle, leaving a glowing picture that often threatens to run translucent.

Into this dirty world steps Anna (Naomi Watts), a sweet, sensitive and – yes – sexy nurse who happens upon a diary that details the awful things those Russians are up to. Anna is a script writers dream; not only does her hair flow blondly out from the edges of her helmet as she straddles her hulking motorbike, she’s also a bit too moralistic to let the diary fly. Add to this her affinity for the Russian child she tends at the hospital and we have a perfectly tangled narrative knot.

Viggo Mortensen, wonderfully disguised as a lowly Chauffeur cum Undertaker – tattoos and all – completes the scriptwriting formula. His character Nikolai is to Eastern Promises what Tom Hagan is to The Godfather, although he is a touch extra-curricular in his pursuit of Anna. The scene is well set, then, for a nice little thrill ride along the blood lines of gangs and families.

Cronenberg’s treatment of this material is stylistically engaging, although rarely as edgy or inventive as in previous outings. He again proves himself an adept symbolist, grafting character developments onto objects that garner meaning as the film progresses. Where we could trace the relationship between father and son through the passage of the shotgun in A History of Violence, here the bike denotes the to-and-fro frisson between Anna and Nikolai. Firstly swapping from one to the other, it gradually makes its way to the front of the screen in the film’s enigmatic closing moments.

Unsurprisingly, the violence is remarkable, and Cronenberg again proves that no one in Hollywood can do it quite as he does. Whilst he continues to indulge his penchant for the body as a site of mutilation, his frame increasingly seems to value omissions as much as it does graphic content. Frequently, the act itself is edited out, and we see instead the beginning of the action before an abrupt cut to its gruesome results. Such quick-fire elisions catapult the viewer into the middle of the action and ask us to fill in its gaps. So when Nikolai nakedly wards off two blade-wielding Chechen henchmen in a public bathhouse, Cronenberg teases us both with the whereabouts of the gang members, and the whereabouts of Mortensen’s member itself.

But all the time the narrative is a little too slow on its feet, and its characters’ actions a little too obvious, for such symbolism and virtuoso violence to really take hold. It’s not about the twist (which you may see coming and you may not), but it is the predictability with which Anna gets sucked in, and the somehow unimpeachable behaviour of Nikolai, that weigh the film down. At one point in the film Mortensen must dispense of a body, and refuses to let it sink until it’s hit the Thames Barrier. The body doesn’t sink, but does wash ashore before the barrier. You get the feeling that Eastern Promises does the same; a worthy attempt, it comes up just a little short of its own finishing line.