From the opening frames, ‘Eastern Promises’ unfolds in layers, releasing mysteries like a Russian matryoshka doll, revealing worlds within worlds, people within people and secrets within secrets. It seems to be a simple, cinematic Dantean jaunt into the criminal underworld soon shown to be a puzzle, where pieces of greed, power, suffering and humble humanity are pushed together, yielding an extremely complex and powerful film.
The story unfolds in the immigrant pockets of London, where foreigners hooked on the dream of prosperity are caught and easily abused in the shadows. The particular focus is a Russian quarter, where the Russian mob quietly conducts ‘business’ under the oily London rain, with gurka in palm.
We are brought into this world by a midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), who delivers a baby to a 14-year-old prostitute, who dies soon after giving birth. Finding the girl’s diary and with the hope of finding a home for the baby, Anna is led to a Russian restaurant, quietly lorded over by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). When not making borscht, Semyon charmingly commands the Vory V Zakone, a Russian gang where a resume is composed of the prison tattoos each member wears.
Anna, hoping for Semyon to translate the diary, is drawn into the discreetly hidden, cut throat world of the Russian mob. Her attention to the life of the dead girl and her baby leads her into the path of Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), a soft-spoken chauffer who keeps Semyon’s hard-drinking son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) in check. Anna is attracted and drawn in by her own line of questions to an enigmatic Nikolai, whose hints of decency are obscured by a tattooed body and a history of violence. Nikolai rises quickly within Semyon’s ever-hardening circle of control without losing his own basic decency.
As Anna falls deeper into the world of the Vory, her mother (Sinead Cusack) and Uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski) warn her against reading into the dead girl’s life, even as they too begin to investigate the diary. As Nikolai is repeatedly sent to block Anna’s search and secure the diary, which could blow open the world of the Vory to the police, he falls more intensely under Semyon’s hand and becomes a pawn in his grander schemes.
Through the gory murders and cover-ups, the trenches of sexual slavery and the money these enterprises make, the audience is led through the world of a London of foreigners, a brotherhood based in abuse and a murderer’s kindness. Every minute is a measured descent into the darker end of the immigrant experience, narrated by excerpts from the dead girl’s Cyrillic diary, telling her life from beginning to end in heartbreaking bullets.
Screenwriter Steve Knight makes more of the mob movie genre, avoiding simplicity by digging deeper, unflinchingly illuminating the ability of human beings to destroy other human beings and benefiting off their bones. For all the reserve of the characters and the brilliant calculation of each scene, director David Cronenberg creates an ultimately emotional thriller about the human right to be human and regarded as such.
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