Eastern Promises
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Muller-Stahl, Vincent Cassel
Director: David Cronenberg
The film: Although it's essentially a story of dark deeds in London's Russian criminal underworld, Eastern Promises bears all the hallmarks of David Cronenberg's career-long fascination with corporeal matters.
The story of a midwife's pursuit of the truth behind the pregnancy and death of a 14-year-old Russian girl becomes a gallery of the grotesque: a baby is delivered as a corpse is mutilated, and women's and men's bodies are scarred in different ways as a mark of induction into the world of prostitution and organised crime. Alongside it all, identities - whether ethnicity, class and profession - are subsumed, retaken and reconstructed.
Eastern Promises is visually arresting, offering a mix of disturbing violence and masterful intrigue that rivals that of A History of Violence, Cronenberg's much-acclaimed outing from 2005. Again teaming up with Viggo Mortensen (above), the filmmaker spins a tale set among the ranks of the London branch of vory v zakone, a shadowy brotherhood of high-ranking Russian gangsters. Mortensen plays Nikolai, the chauffeur to master mobster Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl) - whose facade as a benign, grandfatherly restaurateur conceals a remorseless brutality - and the confidant of his unruly son Kirill (Vincent Cassel).