David Cronenberg delivers one of his finest all-time efforts in this gritty crime drama set in London. Midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) finds a Russian diary on the body of a young girl who dies in childbirth, which leads her to gangster Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), and his driver and "cleaner", Nikolai Luzhin (Viggo Mortensen). Anna gets in over her head, as Semyon tries to cover up the messes of his boneheaded son, leading to one particularly intense fight scene in a bathroom, as a nude Nikolai fends off two determined attackers. This all leads to a plot twist that shouldn't be revealed, but certainly comes as quite the shock. Even before that, Cronenberg's film is an impressively detailed peek inside the world of London's Russian gangs, complete with the violent murder that this entails, with the director refusing to turn away from every throat-cutting along the way. Mortensen's Oscar-nominated performance is simply sublime, and alone worth the watch.
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