Eastern Promises (2007)

"London is a city of whores and queers."

I confess that I need to see more early period avid Cronenberg for his trademark body horror, and I will. Yet up to now I've only seen some of his late period non-fantasy stuff- Crash and Cosmopolis, both excellent. So what will I make of Eastern Promises?

Well, the directing is excellent, of course, from the framing of the first shot onwards. This is Cronenberg's London film, a tribute to what remains very much an imperial capital long after its empire has gone, a melting pot, a metropolis and world city far out of proportion to the nation of which it is capital, and a city which now, alas, faces the catastrophe of Brexit.

And yet... despite the excellence of Naomi Watt and the superbly ambiguous Viggo Mortensen, this is a very good but hardly superlative gangster film with both a conscience and an aesthetic for violence (which is excellent throughout). The famous twist is... fairly predictable, and what we have is a film about the Russian mafia, albeit a perfectly good one, and fascinating about the context with the tattoos and that depressingly prevalent Russian homophobia, but this is less good than either of the other Cronenberg films I've seen so far.

What it does show, though, is how many in less fortunate parts of our continent still see London as being paved with gold, so they come, and are abused and disappointed, hopefully not to the extent of poor Tatiana. But what we have here is a good film that, while well-directed, feels more like television than film.,