This is either a seriously good film with some flaws or a seriously flawed film with some good elements. I am hoping to work out which it is by the finish of this, otherwise I will have denied you a proper ending, and we all know how irritating that is.
Eastern Promises opens with a throat-cutting slaughter in a barber’s shop — and why wouldn’t it? This being a David Cronenberg film — and then almost instantly cuts to the bloodied birth of a baby. Life and death, death and life, and all of it pretty brutal and all that. Nothing new here. Nothing to write home about. But, thankfully, the plot speedily and greedily surges forward.
The baby’s mother — a 14-year-old Russian, Tatiana — dies giving birth but at least has the good sense to do so on the watch of Anna (Naomi Watts), one of the hospital’s midwives.
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