"Eastern Promises" by David Cronenberg

December 6, 2007

In 2003 the Austrian Film Museum devoted a complete Retrospective to the works of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg and included several of his works in the collection. Now we are proud to present the premiere of Cronenberg’s most recent film.
 
Eastern Promises, starring Viggo Mortensen and Naomi Watts, is set in the milieu of London's Russian Mafia and takes the guise of a blood-soaked gangster thriller. Hiding behind the façade, as so often the case with Cronenberg, is a multi-layered and highly ambivalent investigation of normality, (family) identity and "evil" – both as imagined fantasy and reality.
 
After the unanimous praise for A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, it would seem as if American critics are finally arriving at the same verdict about the director which has already existed for a long time in Europe: "David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation." (J. Hoberman, 2007)