David Cronenberg has always had something to say about the grotesque transformations that result when science and technology transgress the flesh, and the ensuing social breakdown. But there was a time when he spoke about it in the language of experiments, infections, mutations, identity-altering drugs, malignant broadcast signals, genetic accidents.
Lately, he's moved away from the altered body to focus on larger organisms. Now, instead of frail and pliant human bodies, it's innocent small towns and Western cities populated by ordinary, orderly people that play host to virulent foreign parasites, and the failed experiments are social.
The director's career has in some ways been a reprise of the greatest fears of the 1950s, so it makes sense that technophobia and fear of the unrecognizable self have given way to xenophobia and fear of the unrecognizable society. Look out. The Russians are coming.
Expertly realized and gunmetal slick, "Eastern Promises" whirs along with perfect efficiency, but doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block. (Squeamishness, yes.) The movie is in many ways a B-movie companion piece to "A History of Violence." Here, again, the mutating virus walks, talks and waves a gun around, infecting the body politic. And, again, the good guy is the guy who can be very bad when he needs to be.
Set in the shadowy underbelly of the new criminal London, "Eastern Promises" right away throws various lambs -- a newborn baby, various teenage sex slaves, a Western European liberal with pure intentions -- to the Russian wolves. The movie begins with two ritual bloodlettings. First thing, a Russian is killed at a barber shop, his throat sawed open by an idiot kid with a dull knife. Then a young Russian girl hemorrhages to death on a pharmacy floor shortly before giving birth to a baby.
The baby is delivered by a half-Russian, half-English midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), who becomes obsessed with locating the infant's family. The dead girl has left a diary, which leads Anna to the Trans-Siberian restaurant, which leads her to the ultraviolent underworld of the Vory V Zakone, or Russian mafia, traffickers in girls, drugs and (because every crime ring needs a good front) surprisingly delicious borscht.
