Earlier this summer I got the urge to revisit David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen’s “A History of Violence.” It made me remember that I had never watched Cronenberg and Mortensen’s follow up to that from two years later. So I decided it was time to finally address that.

Film 18: “Eastern Promises”

My excuse for not seeing it: I remember being really interested in seeing it when it came out. I think the biggest reason was that 2007 was just a really good year for film. “No Country for Old Men,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Juno,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Persepolis,” “Ratatouille,” “The Simpsons Movie,” “The Mist,” “Shrek The Third,” “300” (shut up, it was inescapable at the time).

There are so many more that fall very far from good that I still saw in theaters in 2007, like “Spider-Man 3,” “Transformers,” Rob Zombie’s “Halloween,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Ghost Rider,” “Evan Almighty,” and “28 Weeks Later.” It was pre-kids, and I was often getting reimbursed for tickets from my job. 2007 was kind of a mini 1999 for film.

I was going to the theater on a weekly basis, and if I missed something right away, it quickly slipped from my memory. Which does not feel at all familiar in the constantly churning world of “content” nearly 20 years later. So it fell into the black hole of many other films that will eventually end up in this blog series.

It’s weird to think about, given how violent they are, but “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” is probably the most mainstream run of Cronenberg’s career, up there with his streak of “The Dead Zone,” “The Fly,” and “Dead Ringers” in the 80s. It says something about Cronenberg’s work that those five films are the “safe” choices. But while those 80s films are more fantastical, “Violence” and “Promises” are where Cronenberg leans more into realism and drama, and less toward body horror and crazy twins obsessed with… I’m not sure I can summarize “Dead Ringers” in a half sentence.

Again, this is a fairly straightforward film for Cronenberg, with no especially big twists beyond mixing a bit of espionage into traditional mobster fare. The film’s real strength is its casting, with Naomi Watts as a midwife looking for answers in the death of a teen mother and Vincent Cassel as the Fredo-esque son of a Russian mobster. Mortensen shines as the seemingly monstrous Nikolai, a driver and cleaner for Cassel’s character, and Armin Mueller-Stahl as a seemingly kindly Russian restauranter who offers to help Watts. You know that expectations and reality are unlikely to lineup for Mortensen and Mueller-Stahl’s characters, but the nuances of the parts are still handled masterfully by the actors and Cronenberg’s directing.

Part of what helps keep “Eastern Promises” more grounded than a lot of Cronenberg’s work is the script by Steven Knight, who played with similar ethnic gang tropes in his series “Peaky Blinders.” But the (then) contemporary setting makes it feel more analogous to Knight’s 2002 film “Dirty Pretty Things,” which also dealt with the underworld of immigrants in London.

Unlike “Peaky Blinders,” “Eastern Promises” features no (that I can remember) gun violence, helping it to stand out from countless gangster films. I wonder if it was the London setting or Cronenberg’s Canadian sensibilities that helped steer the film in that direction. Or perhaps it was how prominent gun use was in “A History of Violence” that prompted Cronenberg and Mortensen to take another direction with the film.

That’s not to say that there’s no violence. There is so much, mostly knife-inflicted. The film’s big centerpiece is an epic nude knife fight between Russian mobsters in a bathhouse. Cronenberg’s films often have an interplay between sex and violence, and you could easily make the argument that the bath house scene is more erotic than actual sex scenes in the film.

Movies it inspired me to check out: The thing that immediately springs to mind is I should finally get around to watching the “Coda” cut of “The Godfather Part III.” The final shot of Mortensen in this film reminded me of Michael Corleone at the end of the first Godfather film. I will hint that my next film (which I’ll be posting next month) is in a series I mention somewhere in this blog post. If you figure it out, you’re a pretty cool person.