Eastern Promises
The movie really makes you think about some of the issues shown in the movie, as the real-world problems that they are.
Review by Sirus

To call Eastern Promises a movie about crime is in part true but the movie is a lot more than that. Eastern Promises is David Cronenberg’s very human representation of the sorts of things that go on in a world most of us will never see with our own eyes. At the beginning of the movie we are shown a scene in which a Russian man executes another man in a barber shop, in a bloody display of power. Our view switches to an Indian owned pharmacy where, while two Indian people are doing business, a young girl enters in a trench coat. She looks like she is about to try and rob the place until she asks for help and we notice the blood she is dripping onto the floor. She is rushed to the hospital where we discover she is pregnant and, in the delivery of the baby, she dies, leaving the baby without a home.

Luckily for the baby, one of the people who delivered her, Anna (Naomi Watts) is filled with compassion upon seeing the child left alone. Anna sets off on a journey to discover any sort of family the child has by reading the mother’s diary, which happens to be in Russian. Her search gets her caught up in the world of the Russian mafia, where she meets a man named Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who is a driver for the mob. The story takes many different paths and explores multiple characters but none of them are given sufficient screen time to be declared the central focus of the movie. The movie brings in themes of exploitation of women and power structures of organized crime.

Neither of the actors mentioned above has a large enough role to be considered a starring role but both do a fantastic job in their roles spoken and un-spoken. Viggo Mortensen does a particularly good job with his Russian accent although I found myself having a little trouble understanding most of the Russian men when they spoke English due to the strong accents. Eastern Promises is not a movie for people who want adrenaline rush action. What action there is, is over quite fast, except one scene towards the end. The movie moves along at a slow, deliberate pace for the entire movie, never giving the viewer more information than they require to progress at any given moment. The film’s score is solemn and fitting with a good amount of the music played on violin. I was expecting an action movie and in that respect would have found myself coming out of Eastern Promises disappointed, if I hadn’t been challenged to think as a viewer. The movie really makes you think about some of the issues shown in the movie, as the real-world problems that they are.

Final Score: 4/5