Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassell

Director: David Cronenberg

Running time: 1 hr 40 mins


REVIEW:

Because HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was such a huge hit, both critically and financially, not to mention the handful of awards it gathered, masterclass auteur David Cronenberg sticks to the basics of bloodshed filmmaking and gives us its unintended sequel, EASTERN PROMISES: A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE 2. Or maybe you can call it A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: THE RUSSIAN CONNECTION. Or just call it EASTERN PROMISES, it doesn’t diminish its own gore-spluttered sheer brilliance of a film.


Sequel or not, it goes back to the roots of VIOLENCE and studies, er, well, violence. EASTERN PROMISES is probably one of the most Cronenbergian films that Cronenberg can make. Throw in some dark, gloomy story of underground mafias, pull out lights from the street, diffuse some mist, and paint the town red with blood, there’s the perfect mix of Cronenberg’s main course. But what makes this a compelling film that thankfully shuns away from the shallower part of the pond is that in its subtext, there’s morality beneath its murky waters.


Viggo Mortensen, reteams with Cronenberg after being so fantastic in VIOLENCE, plays the mysterious bodyguard Nikolai, also a mafia fixer and driver, whose boss, the laid-back patriarch Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), is the god of a Russian underground mafia clan in the suburbs of London. But before we cascade to them, the story opens with the death of a pregnant teenage girl in a garage shop and a birth of a baby plummets the whole sinister plot moving. Anna Khitrova (the beautiful Naomi Watts), a Russian-born Londoner midwife, vows to dig deeper into the enigma and determines to find the baby’s family and save it from foster care. The dead mother’s diary came into her hands, and with the help of her mother and uncle (who’re also Russian born) to translate everything, it all led her to Nikolai and the entire furtive bloody affair of the Russian underworld in London, with subtext to Eastern European prostitutes being shipped to London and abused.


Cronenberg is perfect at pathos. He sulks in moods and visceral atmospheres that gave London a disparaging, eerie countenance that you wouldn’t find in postcard-perfect London photographs. However, one misstep of the film was that it sways between an issue-driven, morality plot to a dark gangster flick. One fascinating step, however, is Mortensen’s egregious, very contemplative face of a character – a performance that’s so carefully constructed that Mortensen might have probably immersed himself in the Russian atmosphere for decades. In VIOLENCE, there was no doubt Mortensen proved himself as a top-class actor, but here, veiled in a thick Russian-accented accent with a very thuggish yet professional cold-blooded killer-demeanour, asserts his CV with another solid performance. Slap this bloke with an Oscar nom, nobody would protest, I presume.


However, no matter how good this film is, it’s not a film for everybody. Easily disgusted individuals, run away for with you tummies, as what might befall might not prove pleasurable to your inner senses. Probably one of the most effectively disturbing, seat-gripping, stomach-churning hell of a fight sequence this year, EASTERN PROMISES will defy your lasting tolerance for its amazing bathhouse bloodshed scene. It’s a sequence that deserves some plaudits by pundits. The white tiles, two black-clothed assassins with knives, the steam, Mortensen vulnerably nude – these erupted in a showdown that’s not at all fabulous by Hollywood standards and gives us the three basic g’s: gore, gruesome, and great.


VERDICT:

A tad inferior by an inch to Cronenberg’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE but certainly, EASTERN PROMISES is a fascinating thing to watch; gives us gore and glory, and surprisingly, humanity beneath Mortensen’s cold-blooded, stone-hearted Mafia fixer, and Watts’ compassionate nurse. The bathhouse scene is worth the ticket alone.



RATING: B+