David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is a straighter version of Inland Empire, which isn’t to say that it isn’t totally queer. The film is the story of a woman in trouble: Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), a London midwife who becomes obsessed with finding the family of a 14-year-old sex worker who dies after delivering a child under her watch. The anonymous dead girl’s diary, written in Russian, provides the film with its heavy-handed narration and brings Anna in contact with Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), an old-school don who commandeers the Vory V Zakone criminal faction out of his Trans-Siberian restaurant, his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and their mysterious driver Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).
The story is clear-cut, which is something of a bummer after the heady, one-two punch of Spider and A History of Violence, both triumphs of layering and density, but Cronenberg’s exquisite framing provides the film with arresting psychological dimensions. Only Roman Polanski can better frame the world along diagonal lines, but Cronenberg’s images are more insinuating, leaving one feeling wary of what may be bubbling beneath the surface of things.
Way before Semyon learns that Kirill is being ridiculed by his enemies for possibly being gay, Cronenberg has already amped up the homoerotic tension: in Kirill insisting on watching Nikolai have sex with a prostitute from behind, as well as in Nikolai’s balls-out escape from the grip of two goons inside a Turkish bath. The film’s Russians are not conceived beyond vodka-guzzling stereotypes, and Steven Knight’s screenplay, much in the spirit of the atrocious Dirty Pretty Things, essentially transforms the nightmare of thwarted immigrant dreams into a tawdry sex expo, but Cronenberg’s contemplation of codes of masculine honor by anxiously putting the male body on the line is deliciously transgressive.
Image/Sound
The brand new UHD master of Eastern Promises that Kino Lorber has sourced was color graded by cinematographer Peter Suschitzky. The reds are especially vibrant, from the pools of blood to the red velvet inside the Trans-Siberian restaurant. Blacks are nice and inky, particularly across the rainy, nighttime sequences, which have a beautifully eerie texture. The image is sharp and rich in detail throughout, with just enough grain to capture some of that 35mm softness. The 5.1 audio is nicely balanced, lending a depth to Howard Shore’s lush orchestrations and a crispness to the sound design in the bathhouse fight scene.
Extras
The extras are pretty slim, consisting of five featurettes, of which only two offer much insight into the filmmaking. In a new interview, screenwriter Steven Knight digs into his fascination with the Russian mafia. Two other featurettes center around David Cronenberg. In one he discusses his decision to stress the importance of tattoos to the made mafia man, and the second includes brief thoughts from several of the actors, who provide a broad overview of the film. The two final featurettes, each running just a hair over one minute, focus on Naomi Watts learning to ride a motorcycle and the infamous bathhouse sequence, respectively.
Overall
This disc’s extras are all but perfunctory, but Kino’s exquisite 4K transfer is easily the best that Eastern Promises has looked on home video to date.
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Eastern promises has one very unconvincing clip of the Chelsea football fans coming out of Stamfor Bridge. The idea of a young blond lady riding a 2 wheel Ural bike made me smile. I had a 3 wheel Ural and my feet could never reach the ground with those rubber saddles. But tapping into the Roman Abramovitch connection was amusing.