The tension

And here comes the trick that Knight and Cronenberg play on us. We, as the viewer, know that Semyon is an evil man. Very evil and everything around him is evil. We know that the diary likely contains information that Semyon normally would have people killed for. The issue is then, if Anna can trust Semyon to do a real translation or if he’s going to lie to her, or maybe even get her killed?

Parallel to this, Anna keeps pushing her uncle to do the translation and he keeps refusing. Unknown to Anna, it has become a race against time. She has to convince her uncle to translate the diary before Semyon figures out what Anna knows.

It’s in the context, the order, of the scenes, that gives the story its tension. How they are put together. Because we as the reader/viewer know more than Anna.

This subtle trick creates enormous tension and suspense in the story. We sit watching this part of the film on the edge of our seats hoping that uncle Stepan will come to his senses and help Anna so that she can get as far away from Semyon as possible before it’s too late.

Even though this tension is resolved in another way, it moves the story forward in a very efficient way. Scenes that viewed in isolation are somewhat boring, suddenly become almost unbearably tense. Simply because of the scene preceding it and the knowledge we gather from that. We know so much more than Anna does. We are omnipresent in the story but Anna is not. And because the character of Anna has been firmly established a very likable character, we are constantly hoping that she will be safe and get out of the situation unharmed.

Absence

This is of course nothing new in the ways of telling or structuring stories, but Cronenberg and Knight’s approach is interesting because of the absence of what you normally see in suspenseful movies.

Normally you would accompany a tense scene with menacing music or increasingly hectic intercutting between another location/scene. Cronenberg and Knight do not employ this. Both scenes with Anna and Semyon in the first half of the movie are so much more effective because of this. The absence of narrative elements.

We are not entirely sure on what the motives of Semyon are. We know on one hand that he is a ruthless Russian gangster (or at least affiliated with gangsters), but he also seems genuinely interested in Anna — albeit for different reasons than what Anna might think. Anna’s motives are not entirely clear either. Is she seeking solace with a father-figure she so sorely misses in her life or is her aim just to find the relatives of the dead pregnant woman?

All these things combined make the scenes tense and filled with uncertainties. Which then, in turn, makes us as the audience tense up. We want to leave, to get out of there, and hopefully take Anna with us.

It’s a simple narrative trick and used many times before in all sorts of movies, but it works very well in Eastern Promises. It keeps the tension going for a very long time.

I highly recommend reading Steven Knight’s entire screenplay and then rewatch the movie again.