Eastern Promises Movie Review

A late-night chemist is a pool of light in a shabby high street in a part of London unknown to Richard Curtis; a junkie stumbles in, clutching her pregnant belly and asking for help. The chemist brusquely tells her that he cannot give her methodone without a prescription, but that’s not the kind of help she needs. Rushed to hospital, she dies in labour. Her midwife, Anna (Watts), is deeply affected by her plight and resolves to find the baby’s family with the help of the girl’s diary. Which is written in Russian, a language Anna neither reads nor speaks. Initially she hopes to find answers at home, with the help of her Russian uncle Stepan (Skolimowski), but he urges caution; when a clue takes her to the Trans-Siberian restaurant owned by the affable Semyon (Mueller-Stahl), Anna begins to realise how right Stepan was.

For Semyon is not just the owner of a restaurant. He is part of the Russian mob; the head of a family in the Vory V Zakone criminal brotherhood, and his avuncular exterior masks a coldly brutal core. Anna’s investigation brings her to Semyon’s attention, and threatens to expose his business, and that of his son, Kirill (Cassel), whose actions have set off a gang war. Working for the family as a driver is the mysterious Nikolai (Mortensen), bound to the Vory by oath and yet attracted to Anna and the glimpses of another, more innocent world that she brings him. As the family tightens its grip on him, Nikolai finds his loyalties divided.

Naomi Watts, normally quite irritating, matches Mortensen in a less showy role. Anna is stubborn; her own vulnerability makes her determined that the orphaned baby will not suffer. When she meets Nikolai, she is scared of him, but is also intrigued (who wouldn’t be, after all?); though she rapidly gets out of her depth, this is believable because she is, after all, just an ordinary Londoner who can’t believe that sex trafficking is going on behind the net curtains of the three-bed semi down the tree-lined street. Both leads are excellent, but the outstanding performance is from Armin Mueller-Stahl. Like Forrest Whittaker as Idi Amin, Mueller-Stahl has that ability to go from charming old gent in a cuddly jumper to stone-cold killer in a nano-second and his old world manners are all the more chilling for it. Less successful is Vincent Cassel’s Kirill, who seems to be permanently on the verge of hysteria and almost always drunk.

It's not all good; the final twist is unnecessary and sometimes its all a bit excessive, with the Russian accents and the sunglasses and the leather and the tattoos and all, but its also blackly humorous and genuinely tense, with some superb performances and a stonkingly good fight scene.

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Eastern Promises Press Conference

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