Eastern Promises

The mysterious Nikolai Luzhin is a driver for one of London’s most notorious Russian mob families.

Semyon, the head of the family, hides his trafficking and illegal deeds behind the façade of the plush Trans-Siberian restaurant he runs; his son Kirill is too volatile to succeed him, and too tightly bound to Nikolai.
Anna, a half-Russian midwife working in North London, is shaken by the death of a 14-year-old Russian girl who recently gave birth to a baby daughter.
Anna takes the girl’s private diary to find her address, but as soon as she discovers that Semyon and his family are deeply involved in the death, the mob start closing in.
While a chain of murders and violence breaks out, Nikolai decides to protect Anna and the baby. But who is he really? And who does he stand for?  

There is a hidden London that we don’t know, an underworld dealing in a white slave trade and horrific violence that has crept in from Eastern Europe over the last decade.
 Screenwriter Steve Knight, who already investigated the dark side of the city in Dirty Pretty Things (2002) has constructed an intricate plot in which two worlds -  respectable, everyday people and organized crime - collide.
Nikolai is the only link, but his divided loyalties put everyone in more trouble.
David Cronenberg, a specialist in nightmarish dramas (The Dead Zone, The Fly), uses awkward camera angles and dark photography  to render the sense of mystery.
 The gory scene at the bathhouse is pure bravura, although not for the fainthearted.

The film sports piercing performances from the villain squad: Viggo Mortensen  as Nicolai has  an extraordinarily expressive face and body (revealed in every tattoo-covered inch).
Armin Mueller-Stahl’s glance gives you shivers; Vincent Cassel’s outbursts of rage are genuinely scary.

The weakest link is Naomi Watts, too refined to be an ordinary nurse who lives with her mum.
That said, Eastern Promises is an excellent thriller whose haunting atmosphere clings onto you like steam in a bathhouse.
Screening this week at the London Film Festival, the film will be officially released in the UK on 26th October.

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