Creative destruction

Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg says he wants to treat violence seriously | Sam Thielman

Unless you're seeing a comedy or a children's film (and sometimes even then), the next time you go to the movies you'll probably see a story about a central act of violence. Sometimes the violence looks fun or satisfying (in Braveheart, for example, or any of the Bourne movies), but in the films of David Cronenberg, it looks like the most horrible thing in the world.

Eastern Promises, the director's latest movie, skirts along the outside borders of even the more permissive R rating. The film's climactic bathhouse fight scene—in which Russian mobster Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) fights, naked, for his life with a pair of knife-wielding Chechen thugs—is so excruciating that even the seasoned actors and directors at the premiere were audibly cringing whenever a hook-shaped blade found its target.