Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises is a crime thriller set in London's Russian immigrant community. Anna, a midwife at a city hospital, delivers the baby of a teenage girl who dies in childbirth. Among the dead girl's belongings she finds a diary written in Russian, and as she looks for the child's relatives she has the entries translated. Her search draws her toward a family that runs a well-known Russian restaurant, without her realizing how deeply that family is involved in organized crime. She also meets Nikolai, a driver for the family, and the growing connection between them places them both in danger once the diary's contents threaten people who will go to great lengths to keep it quiet.

David Cronenberg directed the film, the sixteenth of the twenty-two features listed for him in chronological order, following A History of Violence and preceding To Each His Own Cinema. Steven Knight wrote the screenplay, and Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai opposite Naomi Watts as Anna, with Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinéad Cusack and Donald Sumpter among the main cast. The production was supported by Focus Features, Serendipity Point Films, BBC Film and Scion Films.

Made for roughly 52 million dollars, the film returned about 56 million dollars worldwide. It holds a 7.6 rating on IMDb from more than 278,000 votes and a 7.3 on TMDB from a few thousand votes, while its critics' rating stands at 7.9 from 200 reviews, indicating broad approval from reviewers and audiences alike.