Eastern Promises (2007) on Netflix
A midwife delivers the baby of a teenage Russian prostitute and reads the girl's diary to trace her family. Her search brings her to Nikolai Luzhin, a crime family's driver.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.6/10279,914 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Tatiana, a 14-year-old Russian prostitute, dies in childbirth in a London hospital, leaving a baby daughter and a diary written in Russian. The midwife who delivered the baby, Anna Khitrova, wants to keep the child out of foster care and sets out to find the girl's relatives. Her mother, Helen, is receptive; her uncle Stepan, a former KGB officer, advises caution. The diary points Anna toward the Trans-Siberian Restaurant, run by Semyon, whose family belongs to the Vory V Zakone brotherhood. Semyon offers to translate the diary, but Anna gives him a photocopy instead. Nikolai Luzhin, Semyon's driver, serves as bodyguard to Semyon's son, Kirill.
Cast
- Lalita Ahmedas Customer
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Eastern Promises (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mortensen studied Russian mafia tattoos with Gilly McKenzie, organized crime specialist for the UN, and the tattoos he wore were so realistic that diners in a Russian restaurant in London fell silent out of fear until he admitted they were for a film. From then on he washed them off whenever he left the set.
- Nominated for Best Actor at the 80th Academy Awards, Mortensen told the Associated Press “If there’s a strike I will not go”, a reference to the Writers Guild of America strike. It ended on February 12, 2008, he attended the ceremony, and lost the award to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood.
- There is not a gun in the film and there were none in the script. The curved blades used in the steam bath fight are linoleum knives rather than exotic Turkish ones, chosen because the characters could walk the streets carrying them and, if they were ever caught, say they were linoleum cutters.
- The film's "Trafalgar Hospital" was actually the real Middlesex Hospital, closed to patients since December 2005 and demolished in 2008; crews fitted a fake period-matching "Trafalgar Hospital" inscription over its main door for the shoot.
- Eastern Promises was the first film that David Cronenberg shot entirely outside Canada, the country where the director had made every one of his films until then.
- It was the last winner of the Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award to win none of its Oscar nominations, a run that lasted until Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans in 2022.
