Eastern Promises (2007)

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises arrives from 2007, a year when a crime thriller could still simply be a crime thriller. Naomi Watts plays Anna, a midwife who reads a dead teenager's diary and wanders into the London branch of the Russian mafia. She is capable, she is stubborn, and she drives the investigation with quiet resolve. The film does not pause to congratulate her for it, nor does it pause to congratulate itself. This is a story about a baby, a diary, and a great deal of violence, told with the grim efficiency of a man who has spent thirty years making movies about bodies.

The picture's most discussed sequence remains a steam bath brawl in which Viggo Mortensen, wearing nothing but tattoos, defends his life with linoleum knives. The tattoos are researched. The knives are researched. The nudity exists because men in bathhouses are naked and one of them is about to be stabbed, not because the director wishes to make a statement about the male form. Elsewhere, Vincent Cassel's Kirill nurses a repressed attraction that the script treats as a source of shame and danger inside the organization, never as a teachable moment. The film observes this and moves on. It has corpses to dispose of.

The result is a film with almost no interest in instructing anyone. Nobody delivers a speech about the evils of trafficking, though trafficking is evil and thoroughly present. Nobody explains that the mafia stands in for late capitalism, because it does not. Cronenberg shows us a criminal family, a decent woman, and a midwife's stubborn conscience, then lets the horror speak for itself. In the present climate, such restraint feels almost exotic. We are left to draw our own conclusions, which is, apparently, no longer the fashion.