Why is it called eastern promises

Active 5 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 1k times. I didn't find the word "promise" in any expression of the movie's characters.

Improve this question. Meat Trademark 7, 2 2 gold badges 52 52 silver badges 79 79 bronze badges. Alessandro Porta Alessandro Porta 33 5 5 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Josef Altin Ekrem as Ekrem. Mina E. Mina Azim as Azim. Lalita Ahmed Customer as Customer. Badi Uzzaman Chemist as Chemist. Jerzy Skolimowski Stepan as Stepan. Tatiana Maslany Tatiana as Tatiana voice. Vincent Cassel Kirill as Kirill. Shannon-Fleur Roux Maria as Maria.

David Cronenberg. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. In London, the Russian pregnant teenager Tatiana arrives bleeding in a hospital, and the doctors save her baby only. The Russian descendant midwife Anna Khitrova finds Tatiana's diary written in Russian language in her belongings and decided to find her family to deliver the baby, she brings the diary home and ask her uncle Stepan to translate the document. Stepan refuses, but Anna finds a card of a restaurant owned by the Russian Semyon inside the diary and she visits the old man trying to find a lead to contact Tatiana's family.

When she mentions the existence of the diary, Semyon immediately offers to translate the document. However, Stepan translates part of the diary and Anna discovers that Semyon and his sick son Kirill had raped Tatiana when she was fourteen years old and forced her to work as prostitute in a brothel of their own.

Further, Semyon is the dangerous boss of the Russian mafia "Vory v Zakone", jeopardizing the safety of Anna and her family. Meanwhile, Semyon's driver Nikolai Luzhin gets close to Kirill and Semyon, climbing positions in the criminal organization, but he helps Anna, her family and the baby. Every sin leaves a mark. Action Crime Drama Thriller. Rated R for strong brutal and bloody violence, some graphic sexuality, language and nudity. The Canadian director began his career making unsettling movies in which minds reshape bodies and bodies reshape minds.

His remake of The Fly features Jeff Goldblum pulling out his teeth and vomiting on his food to aid digestion — then gets really gross. It became both his biggest mainstream hit and arguably the apex of his body-horror explorations. From there, the filmmaker started to find increasingly subtler variations on those themes: going psychological with Dead Ringers , Crash and Spider ; turning hallucinatory and literary with Naked Lunch ; waxing on the intersection of tech and flesh with eXistenZ And then comes his somewhat unexpected, yet equally fertile into crime movies.

The film doubles as a primer on the coded language of Russian criminal tattoos, a practice in which every shape and stroke has significance, commemorating accomplishments and serving as both calling cards and warnings. This is a film of double crosses, including one played by the film itself.

Call it a companion piece — another contemplation of how we think of good and evil, heroism and villainy, virtue and vice, and they way those concepts can share space inside the same body.

Maybe it was a head of its time. The chief cop the always impressive Donald Sumpter can read everything about the man, except his personal identity, from the tattoos put on his body as a soldier, a resident of a Gulag and a gangster. Nikolai is similarly adorned.

When he appears clad only in his underpants before the assembled leaders of the Vory V Zakone to be inducted into the gang's inner circles, they can see his whole life on his body, a CV in tattoos. They then have a tattoo artist add the symbols that will make him the Russian equivalent of a 'made man' in the Italian mafia. Indeed, the movie has numerous echoes of The Godfather and the films of Scorsese. Eastern Promises is an exciting story about hypocrisy, decency and different kinds of honour, and about the dark underside of globalisation and multiculturalism.

There are some flaws in the script of a kind that can only be discussed between those who have seen the picture , but most of them are concealed, at least while we sit watching, by the excellence of the acting and Cronenberg's attention to detail. It's a chilling, discomfiting picture, and there's a particularly frightening moment when Mueller-Stahl, the brutal patriarch, leaves Anna with the baby in hospital, purring, silkily: 'So you know where I am, and I know where you are, Anna Ivanova.

Eastern Promises.