Eastern Promises is the kind of intoxicating underworld movie our Bollywood directors ought to make but just cannot.

A bloody violent movie, Eastern Promises is the gritty - and gripping - story of the Russian Mafia in London and a young midwife who accidentally comes in contact with it.

One evening a very pregnant 14-year-old girl walks into an Indian chemist’s shop in London and collapses to the floor bleeding. She’s rushed to the hospital where she delivers a baby girl. Baby survives but the young mother dies in child-birth leaving behind nothing but a diary written in Russian.

The diary is precious not just because it contains the harrowing story of the dead woman and her hope-filled journey from a village in Ukraine to a hellhole in London but also because it’s a harbinger of what lies ahead.

Made by Canadian director David Cronenberg, Eastern Promises delights us with electrifying performances by the talented troika of Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts and the German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl and a well crafted story.

As is to be expected in a movie of the Mafia genre, the chilling - and sometimes sickening - violence is always above the surface.

Viggo Mortensen brings an amazing intensity to his role as a footsoldier - the driver in this case - with the Russian Mafia.

What you see in Mortensen’s portrayal of Nikolai is not the manic energy of Al Pacino’s Tony Montano in Scarface but the coldblooded ferocity of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in Godfather.

In one of the memorable scenes, Mortensen’s character Nikolai Continue Reading…