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is delivering his most assured work.

Eastern Promises starts in typical Cronenberg fashion. As a Russian Mafiosi is getting his hair cut in a small salon, a mentally disabled man walks in and starts talking to the hairdresser. The three men are the only people in the salon. The hairdresser asks the man to shave the customer. He hands him the razor blade. Suddenly the man bursts into rage, taking the razor to the customer's throat and, in true Cronenberg style, slicing it from ear to ear with blood gushing, breathless detail. This is our introduction to the Russian criminal underworld in London.

Cronenberg is, however, more interested in the familial loyalties and hierarchy within this secretive world than its capitalist intentions. This is presented firstly by an unnamed pregnant eastern European teenager entering a pharmacy clutching her stomach. She says she needs help before collapsing. At the hospital, midwife Anna (Naomi Watts) battles to save the baby and its mother, but the girl dies in child birth leaving only a diary and her new born.

Anna asks her uncle - an ex-KGB agent, or so he claims - to translate the young girl's diary to find information about her family. On chasing a link to a restaurant owned by the guarded Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), Anna discovers that the information in the diary could not only put her life in danger, but the baby's too.

It's at the restaurant Anna meets Viggo Mortensen's Nikolai, the company's driver. Anna is quickly suspicious of Nikolai's intentions towards her, and since we see Nikolai disposing of the hairdresser's dead customer, she has ever reason to be. But in protecting the baby girl she has grown so close to, largely because she herself lost her own baby during pregnancy, she must go deeper into this criminal abyss to discover if there is any future for the child.

There's a lovely cyclical story arc to the film that Cronenberg uses as a juxtaposition of tone. Anna's plight is driven by the new life of the baby, and her inner turmoil created by her own child's death; which is set up directly following the death of the baby's mother and the Russian gangster in the hairdresser's salon. Cronenberg looks at life, and the value of life when it is lost, as the root of his story.

A recurring theme is how the Russian mafia get tattoos and how each tattoo provides information about that person's life. During an initiation scene, Nikolai strips off his clothes to show his life story through the symbols permanently painted

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