At the heart, it’s about blood. With Cronenberg, it’s always about blood. No other director of his stature has built a career out of such a fascination with blood, and the other assorted slick bodily fluids that course through Cronenberg’s filmography. What makes him unique, and apart from the average gorehound, is his coldly clinical presentation of the warm organic matters that make up life, and the deeper truths he uses them, slyly, as an avenue to reveal. Eastern Promises is about blood, but in the familial as well as the literal sense. For the director, it’s quite clearly a companion piece to (and just as good as, if not better than) 2005’s fantastic A History of Violence. Both films focus closely on the importance of family. The family you come from, the family you choose, and the families that choose you.

Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, a driver for a Russian mafia family in London, who is rising quickly through the ranks due to his proximity to (and ability to clean up the messes of) the son of the family’s boss. Naomi Watts is Anna, a midwife who gets too close to dirty family business when she begins investigating the contents of the diary of a 14-year-old Russian prostitute who dies in childbirth. Anna has recently found herself back with her own family due to personal difficulties, living with her caring mother in the house she grew up in, and where her scowling Russian uncle is a constant visitor. Nikolai finds himself gradually being welcomed into his adopted mafia family, but it is clear from the start that despite a fierce sense of duty, he has a conscience that sets him apart from his employers. Mortensen plays the role like a man carved out of solid granite. His calm and his façade are impenetrable, yet there is clearly a great deal going on in the mind of the man underneath the chiseled stone. It’s a quietly and brilliantly moving performance from Mortensen comparable to his work in History of Violence.