Have you seen the Cronenberg film with the rampaging gang of mallet-wielding dwarves? This is not a horror movie but a slick and atmospheric thriller, a sort of cross between Goodfellas and The Godfather only set in London and with Russians as the gangsters. But then I realised that this movie too ... is all about a violence and horror that come from somewhere else, invading the ordinary world from a zone as strange as the individual angry mind. Not Russia, I think, and not even ‘Russia’, but some place in our imagination where the secret kindnesses, family values and occasional lovable gestures of the American mob are all banished, and only a mixture of power and pathology remain. ... the [bath] scene is beautifully choreographed. But what does he want? Does he want us to laugh, as most people were doing in the cinema where I saw the film? Does he want nervous laughter perhaps?
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'Eastern Promises' Reviewed | LRB | 
