Eastern Promises

Finding a Russian-language diary among the belongings of a young teenage girl who died in childbirth, London nurse Anna learns that the girl had been part of a human trafficking and prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia. Seeking to locate the girl's family, Anna descends into the London underworld, where she finds an unlikely guide in Nikolai, a mob chauffeur who also functions as a part-time hitman and full-time guardian for the wastrel son of godfather Semyon. Cronenberg’s second collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, this pungently seamy underworld drama continues the intriguing development of the divided-self motif that the two had begun in a HISTORY OF VIOLENCE. Whereas so many previous Cronenberg protagonists had found themselves helpless (even though complicit) in the face of their physical or psychological transformations, Mortensen’s Tom Stall and Nikolai are the deliberate, carefully constructed identities of a forceful and controlling will – but ones that leave the person who bears them equally unsure as to the nature of their “true” self. (Toronto Film Festival)