Reviewed by Katherine Ramsland

One thing about director David Cronenberg: you never know what he's going to do but you know it will make you squirm. From A History of Violence to The Fly, he's shown that he enjoys pushing viewers up against the most disturbing images he can dream up. There's nearly always violence, but more than that, he explores twisted angles of the human personality ordinarily difficult to appreciate. This movie feels like Dostoevsky meets the Sopranos — no surprise when you consider that Cronenberg's reading list included a novel by the Russian master, books about hit men, and even a dictionary that featured Russian prison tattoos.

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Everything's here from Russian literature: the promise of redemption, the good woman, the ambivalent villain, the seemingly lost cause, the sloppy alcoholic, and the teeming underworld of strong and weak characters. An intriguing addition is Cronenberg's inspiration to use what he learned about existential tattoos and the Russian prison culture.

The opening scenes of Eastern Promises spring quick leaks of blood, the symbol of life, death, and identity. In a barber shop, a man's throat is slit open, while in a pharmacy, a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl starts to hemorrhage. The man goes into a freezer while the girl winds up in a hospital. There, a midwife named Anna (Naomi Watts) watches her die in childbirth while the baby survives. Taking the dead girl's diary to track down a relative to take the child, hopefully among London's Russian immigrants, she finds a business card for a restaurant. Visiting, she meets the kindly proprietor, Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who denies knowing the dead girl but seems to want the diary. Not a copy, the original. But Anna's uncle has already translated enough to know it spells trouble. It appears to contain incriminating information about the rough treatment doled out to underage female slaves by members of the vory v zakone, a violent gaggle of Russian gangsters.