Subtlety. While I'm not sure this is a noun that would usually be used in conjunction with the name of David Cronenberg, it feels right after having seen his Russian mafia tale, Eastern Promises.

After watching the in-your-face violence of Hitman or the far-too-literal allusions of Across the Universe, Eastern Promises seems quite gentle by comparison.

Sure, there is violence and gore in Eastern Promises, but when it happens it has more impact because of all the subtlety that came before it - even if there is a guy getting his throat slit with a razor right at the beginning.

Richly drawn characters add to the appeal of this story of a British midwife (Naomi Watts) who finds a diary on a pregnant 14-year-old girl who dies in the emergency room as she is giving birth. Inside is a card that leads her to a restaurant owned by a Russian mobster (Armin Mueller-Stahl).

Watts' character is complex - naive, but at the same time a certain amount of moxie and street smarts. Some of her background is filled in by her drunken Russian uncle at the dinner table - she's half Russian, but can't read the diary. The uncle says she should get rid of the diary, but she persists, because she doesn't want the girl's baby to end up in foster care. She tools around London on an old Ural motorcycle (probably hand-picked for Watts' character by gearhead Cronenberg himself) looking for clues.

Getting off her bike in front of the restaurant, she comes to the attention of two men, the mobster's drunken lout of a son, Kirill (the always-entertaining Vincent Cassel) and Kirill's taciturn driver, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

The diary has some very damning evidence in its pages, and the wiley old Russian mobster wants his hands on the book, and anyone who's read it dead.

Meanwhile, he's got other troubles - his son Kirill went behind his back and ordered the killing of another Russian mobster. So there's a bit of a gang war erupting around this situation.

The real mystery is this guy Nikolai, who doesn't flinch from having to use brutality or the need to cut the fingers off a frozen dead guy (or casually ask for a hair dryer to thaw the guy's clothes a bit). And when he's so gentle around Naomi's character Anna, well, why is he helping?

Things come to a head in a Russian bathhouse - a notorious scene of a naked, tattooed Viggo fighting off two linoleum knife-wielding Chechens.

I don't want to reveal too much more. The beauty of this film is watching the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Note: For audiences at the Lido cinemas, there has been some rather artless butchery by the censors, of a scene in a brothel. But the bathhouse fight is allowed to unspool in its full glory. Enjoy. The film is also showing at the Esplanade, Paragon, Major Ratchayothin and SF World at Central World, but I suspect those prints have been censored as well.