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Eastern Promises

Directed by David Cronenberg

Written by Steve Knight

Starring Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl

Classification: 18A

Rating: ***

A knife slices through a man's throat, a child issues from a mother's womb and the blood mingles, the blood of birth and death. From these early frames, and most everything that follows, it ain't hard to guess we're in classic David Cronenberg territory. Yes, this is a genre film, a crime thriller, that has a fine cast, a crisp plot, a gritty setting, a ballyhooed fight scene, plus a director in top form and full mastery of his sullen art. What it doesn't have is the resonance of Cronenberg's A History of Violence, a film that exploited the same genre even while transcending its limitations. Eastern Promises delivers, but not on that scale.

This time, working from Steve Knight's script, Cronenberg follows his keen nose for the demimonde to the streets of London's East End, where the Russian mob has staked out its turf, importing drugs from Kabul and hookers from their homeland. Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) runs the mob from behind the respectable front of his baroque restaurant. The kingpin is quietly, efficiently, lethal but, in a Shakespearean twist, his princely son Kirill (Vincent Cassel) is just aggressively weak — he's a very loose and insecure cannon.

In this history, violence is passed down through the generations and literally tattooed onto the flesh. Character, however, is a different matter entirely, and the prince doesn't have it.

But Nikolai does. Tripling as chauffeur, assassin and Kirill's playmate, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) is a man of few words and many, scary talents, including a brisk knack for ridding a corpse of its identity by the expedient removal of teeth and digits ("You might vant to leave room," he politely suggests to onlookers and, squirming in our seats, we're tempted to oblige.) Nicely measured out and paced by Cronenberg, the emerging dynamic among this troika — the king, the heir, the pretender — is fascinating to watch, as is the matched set of nuanced and accented performances by three high-quality actors. Mueller-Stahl purrs but with menace; Cassel rages but with vulnerability. Yet it's Mortensen, back again with a director who knows how to use him, who dominates the picture. His Nikolai is the cipher at the centre of the mystery, and he galvanizes our attention, always keeping us guessing — at least until the script robs him of interpretive room. But let's save that cavil for later.

The plot is driven by the entry of relative innocence into iniquity's den. Anna (Naomi Watts) is the English midwife first spotted in that opening delivery-room sequence. The baby survives, the teenage mother does not, but she leaves behind a diary written in Russian, an incriminating journal that documents her treatment working as slave labour in the mob's brothel. The orphaned child awakens Anna's maternal instincts, while the diary piques her curiosity, and she takes it to a translator — takes it, of course, to Semyon, the apparent restaurateur. The perils begin.

From there, the narrative bends and turns with the intrigue you expect from a good genre piece, eventually leading to the ballyhooed fight in question — inside a bathhouse where Nikolai, attired as befits the location, manages to shed his towel along with a lot more blood. Obviously, the nudity gives the brawl a distinctive allure, and Cronenberg has always had an honest way with graphic brutality, but, otherwise, I found the sequence almost conventional, especially the punctuation — a horror-flick resurrection complete with yet another knife aimed at yet another eyeball. Been there, seen that.

As for the large theme that runs through much of Cronenberg's canon — his insistence that the war we fight, the beast we battle, is the one that lurks within our divided psyche — the script doesn't permit a full exploration here. Nor is there any real look at the social equivalent of that personal divide: Violence is repellent and atavistic; violence is essential and attractive. Sure, Anna seems to take a sexual interest in Nikolai's dark side, and the plot hints at the tribal roots of bloodlust, but these thematic pathways are eventually closed off by a script that accedes to the genre's demand for clearer motives and cleaner resolutions.

Don't get me wrong. Of its kind, Eastern Promises is a terrific 100 minutes of filmmaking. But it is "of a kind," and the best of Cronenberg promises more.