Eastern Promises

Cronenberg’s latest film is the story of Anna (Naomi Watts, I Heart Huckabees), a nurse, and her encounter with the Russian mob. She becomes involved after a pregnant 14 year-old prostitute dies in the hospital where she works. She finds a diary written in Cyrillic and asks her conveniently Russian uncle to translate it in order that she identify the girl and any relatives that can look after her surviving baby. Her search leads her to the Russian mob, for whom the girl worked, and the film’s focus shifts to Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who mysteriously helps her. Like A History of Violence, Cronenberg’s latest film is a definite break from the subject matter of horror and virtual reality in his previous films (Shivers, Existenz), but still continues with his familiar themes of bodies and their interactions through sex and violence. The film seems praiseworthy, yet the question remains why? Despite it’s subject matter, the fact that the diegesis only alternates between the family of Anna’s home and the family of the Russian mob, seems to detract from any social commentary about its setting (east London). And yet, the metaphor of family is reduced by the poor development of, and often superficial, familial relations. There is perhaps something of a morality tale here about Kirill’s repressed homosexuality, but it is weakened by the predominant focus on Nikolai (Mortensen). It seems that Cronenberg is once again striving for the familiarities of his other films, but where A History of Violence succeeded in achieving those themes with its simplicity, Eastern Promises loses itself in trying to say too much.

Ugly - because naked people fight