READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007
READ MORE: Director David Cronenberg Q&A
READ MORE: Naomi Watts Q&A
VIEW FILM STILLS: Eastern Promises
VIEW: Cronenberg at Cannes
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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 9/13/07)

Two years ago at Cannes, when his A History of Violence played there, director David Cronenberg announced that his next film would be Painkillers, his first original script since 1999's Existenz. Painkillers would return Cronenberg to the subgenre that he created, referred to by some as "body horror." And early word was that it was going to make Videodrome look like The Princess Diaries. As you might imagine, psychotronically inclined Cronenberg-nuts such as myself fairly drooled at the prospect. But Cronenberg himself "fell out of love" with the Painkillers script, and instead went on to this, a London-based thriller with more than a few intimations of Max Ophüls's 1949 The Reckless Moment (and, as would follow, its 2001 reshaping The Deep End).

Nontheless, this picture surely will not disappoint anyone who feels at home in Cronenberg's brilliantly chilly worlds, and its more putatively accessible aspects may well attract cinematic travelers who've never ventured into one of them before. Scripted by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things, Amazing Grace), Promises stars Watts as Anna, a midwife nurse of Russian extraction who delivers the child of a teen junkie. The mother dies, but the child lives, and the maternally inclined Watts, who's having a hard time emerging from a shattered relationship, goes in search of the dead girl's family with the help of the dead girl's diary. This brings her to restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller Stahl), whose eating establishment is an admittedly tasty front for Russian mafia activity, and who of course plays all sweet, suave, and avuncular with Anna, knowing that she unwittingly possesses dangerous secrets about him. Those secrets are contained in the dead mother's diary, which Anna's uncle is translating, slowly.

Cronenberg does not play the race-against-time aspect too emphatically; the suspense here is measured. The movie instead takes its time looking into its other characters — Vincent Cassell as Semyon's son, the drunken "prince" of the clan, and Viggo Mortensen's Nikolai, a "driver" who's really "an undertaker" and who's angling for a better position in the operation, while taking an unexplained and seemingly benign interest in Anna. Mortenson's character is a chilly variant of his role in History of Violence; here the question is, is he an angel of death or a bonafide angel? Cronenberg doesn't keep us guessing for too long; this isn't a mystery story so much as a cool look at the extremes to which individuals will go to achieve an end.

Containing one of the most cinematically virtuosic set pieces of Cronenberg's career — a bone-crunching battle in a bathhouse that Mortensen (whose performance is entirely remarkable) plays in the nude — Eastern Promises is nonetheless one of Cronenberg's subtlest, most insinuating pictures, and one of the highlights of the year so far.

— Glenn Kenny