Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises reunites director David Cronenberg with actor Viggo Mortensen after their previous collaboration on A History Of Violence - and once again Mortensen is playing a man with an erased history, a man with a concealed identity, a man who inhabits a murky borderline between right and wrong.

After a very young woman dies giving birth to a child in the lead-up to Christmas, attending midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) takes it upon herself to track down the baby's family. The only clues to the dead girl's identity are her diary (written in Russian) and a business card for an opulent restaurant called the Trans-Siberian, so Anna turns for help both to her irascible Russian uncle Stepan (Jerzy Skolimowski), and to the elderly restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). What she does not realise is that Semyon, for all his charming exterior, in fact heads a London chapter of the ruthless Vory V Zakone criminal fraternity, responsible for people trafficking, prostitution rings, drug smuggling and worse - and he has both personal and professional interests in ensuring that the diary's contents remain unread.

Semyon is not the only one to take notice of Anna. His driver and 'undertaker' Nikolai (Mortensen), too, has his cold eye on the determinedly naïve Anna - when, that is, he is not cleaning up after Semyon's volatile, sexually ambiguous son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) or taking care of Semyon's own dirty business. Nikolai seems destined for great things in the organisation, but in this tattooed, tight-lipped underworld, everybody (and every body) has a secret.

Like The Dead Zone, M. Butterfly, Spider and A History of Violence, Eastern Promises is a David Cronenberg film based on a screenplay by another writer - namely Steve Knight, who again, as in his previous script for Dirty Pretty Things, is exploring organised crime and exploitation within London's 'invisible' immigrant subcultures. If the film is organised around the collision of different worlds - Anna's middle-class normality, Semyon's clandestine kingdom, and Nikolai's place somewhere in between - it also dramatises a clash between the world of Knight's conventional (if convoluted) script, and of Cronenberg's more exotic imagination. No-one emerges quite unscathed, although as in Cronenberg's Crash, it is hard to take your eyes off all the scarred wreckage.

For in a sense Eastern Promises does everything a good thriller should, utilising its twisty sensationalism to uncover some ugly truths - in this case the tragic realities of human trafficking, for which Tatiana's diary entries, read in voice-over, serve as a constant reminder. At the same time, it is full of typically Cronenbergian flourishes - a splash of unflinching violence here, some gender transgression there, and some body modification there (the last by way of a pervasive tattooing motif). The problem is that all this never really congeals into anything beyond a solid genre movie, where viewers have been reared to expect a little more from Cronenberg.

The occasional scenes of gory horror seem like mere Cronenberg set-pieces rather than something more tightly integral, as though the director is inking his signature mark onto material not really his own - while, tellingly enough, the tattooing sequences themselves were an ingenious addition to Knight's early drafts, suggested by Cronenberg and Mortensen. These are, needless to say, the film's most compelling part, combining themes of identity, disguise, history, body, art and allegiance into one polyvalent symbol that is both beautiful and repellent to behold.

Mortensen is a greatly underrated actor, and it is thanks to him the rôle of Nikolai receives just the sort of nuance it requires - lodged midway between brutally seductive and inscrutably ambivalent. Watts, too, comes into her own, bringing to life as best she can a frankly bland heroine, while Mueller-Stahl and Cassel each scarily embody a different type of evil. Unlike in Spider, however, where London was a place of grim tangibility, here Cronenberg turns the capital's backstreets into a noirish neverneverland that never really convinces - and, perhaps in keeping with the Christmas theme, there are moments of high melodrama (in particular the climactic confrontation over the baby) that, in all their operatic shrillness, border on pantomime.

By most standards, this would count as a moody and sophisticated thriller - but it just does not quite live up to the Cronenberg promise.