Eastern Promises – 2007 | 100 mins | Crime, Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Viggo Mortensen reteams with A History of Violence director David Cronenberg for this London-set tale of the Russian Mafia, revolving around the sex trade. Extensive location shooting has included Hackney’s Broadway Market and the old Middlesex Hospital. Scripted by Steve Knight, the screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things, the marriage of Cronenberg and Knight has created a compromising if brutally malevolent hybrid. Mortensen produces an extraordinary central performance exuding both brutality and vulnerability.

Set in the gritty world of East London’s Russian mafia, a midwife (Naomi Watts) gets deeper and deeper involved in a criminal underworld feud. After a patient, a Russian girl, dies giving birth, the nurse is determined to find the baby’s family. She has the dead girl’s diary translated from Russian, but that leads her deeper into the underground. Meanwhile, the mafia boss’s driver, Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen), has plans for dethroning his boss, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), even if it means knocking off a few people close to him. He connects with the nurse, and finds himself in the middle of a fight revolving around her.