NEVER a slouch when it comes to startling his audience, David Cronenberg goes for the jugular at the outset of his edgy new thriller. A few minutes into Eastern Promises, a Russian gangster is seated in a barber's chair when he gets a cut he doesn't expect. His throat is slit - in close-up.
Another death follows, when a pregnant 14-year-old eastern European prostitute dies in a north London hospital, and a birth, when her baby is delivered and survives.
The film is set in London at Christmas time, among the city's new affluent Russian population. Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is the ostensibly genial proprietor of the Trans-Siberian Restaurant, where he oversees opulent banquets for customers dripping in jewels and wearing ankle-length fur coats.
The restaurant is a front for the criminal empire Semyon runs, trafficking drugs and teenaged Chechen girls, with the help of his volatile son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Their right- hand man is the laconic chauffeur Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen), who doubles as a killer when required, calmly removing the fingertips of victims before dumping their bodies in the Thames.
All three are members of Vory V Zakone, the criminal brotherhood, and, in keeping with their traditions, Nikolai's body is tattooed with symbols that detail his criminal history.
A young English midwife, Anna (Naomi Watts), enters this world when she delivers the prostitute's baby. The more Anna learns about the dead girl, the more her own life is threatened in Cronenberg's tight, atmospheric thriller, which exerts an unsettling fascination and never follows a predictable route.
The screenplay by Steve Knight unifies the themes he explored in Dirty Pretty Things (immigrants in London) and Amazing Grace (slavery). He also is well placed to write about the affluent, having co-created the lucrative TV franchise Who Wants to Be a Milionaire.
His plotting in Eastern Promises relies on certain dramatic coincidences as the different worlds of the midwife and the gangsters collide. Anna just happens to be the daughter of a Russian immigrant, now deceased, and his brother (played by Polish director Jerzey Skolimowski) is conveniently available to provide translation when Anna needs it.
Cronenberg ensures that the tension never slackens before resolution is reached in a film marked with the unflinching toughness we have come to expect from him, such as when Kirill plays voyeur during a sex scene with a drugged prostitute, and in the frequent graphic violence.
One expertly staged fight sequence takes place in a sauna where the naked Nikolai fights for his life.
Reuniting with Cronenberg after A History of Violence, Mortensen is on rare form, heading an imaginatively chosen international cast that includes Sinead Cusack as Anna's mother. MICHAEL DWYER
Also in cinemas
The Saw series has become a staple of the Halloween release schedule and, as was the case with its predecessors, the fourth film in the franchise opens without any advance press previews. Expect more gore in Saw IV (18 cert, gen release, 92 min), in which a detective has to survive a number of sadistically plotted traps.
