(Some mild spoilers follow.)

Like Neil Marshall’s The Crying Game, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg’s adaptation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly.) Or at least that’s how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis is attached to one Viggo Mortensen. (Actually, come to think of it, vaginas, or substitutes thereof, play supporting roles in Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Crash as well. Plus there’s a talking anal sphincter in Naked Lunch, but that doesn’t count.)

Okay, I’m just kidding about the penis. Featuring easily the best naked male wrestling scene since Larry Charles’ Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Eastern Promises is, on its surface, a fairly conventional thriller, in much the same way that Mortensen seems like a fairly conventional Russian gangster. You probably already know the story: an underused Naomi Watts stumbles upon a child prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia after a young pregnant woman dies on her operating table. (The temptation here is to call it the structural (but not thematic) inverse of Cronenberg’s far superior A History of Violence—same director, same lead actor—but I won’t reveal any plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that, like the Asian American Studies grad class I taught for four years or so, it’s about Family and Identity.)

Critics (okay, David Denby, the only review I’ve read so far) have singled out the gore in Eastern Promises—and how it simultaneously detracts from the film’s seriousness, as well as confirming Cronenberg’s more lurid impulses—but I’m wondering whether that may be part of the point. What’s odd about the film is that the gore doesn’t seem real somehow, and I wonder, again, whether it’s deliberate. There are a couple of throat slashings in Eastern Promises that look like they came right out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film—in other words, patently, stupidly, fake—and then there’s the eyeball-stabbing scene, which results in a rather chaste (and cinematically classic) pool of blood growing underneath the victim’s body. (The way the throat cuttings are shot—front, center, and very slowly—don’t help but foreground their artificiality.)

Contrast this with the oeuvre of another North American director who makes “serious” films but similarly traffics in gore—see Casino, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York—and you’ll see what I mean; Scorsese clearly enjoys this stuff, and makes sure to pummel us with its nauseating realism. Compare this again with Cronenberg’s earlier splatter-filled work in Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Scanners; despite their horror / fantasy-based context, the scenes of violence in those films are excruciatingly detailed.

But more instructively, compare the odd fakery of Eastern Promises to A History of Violence, which is itself bookended by a kind of staging of the fake: the wholesomeness of Small Town America that, upon a second viewing, takes on a surreality that borders on Blue Velvet; the John Woo-stylings of the cartoonish bloodbath at the end. Eastern Promises also seems set in a London that (deliberately?) doesn’t look like the moviegoer’s London (but probably familiar to its residents); the fact that the film is populated by a cast and crew (Cronenberg, Mortensen, Watts, Cassel, Mueller-Stahl, Cusack) that seems like they’re from pretty much everywhere except Russia or London—well, I don’t know where this is going. Maybe some grad student can figure this out.