YMMV / Eastern Promises

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The singer at the restaurant was the subject of many comments on discussion boards, this is something of an in-joke for Russian audiences as the singer is played by the famous Russian folk musician Igor Outkine.
• Complete Monster: Semyon, the leader of The Mafiya, at first seems a nice old man, but it's later revealed he is a domineering, abusive and violent man who has little but contempt for his unstable, Ambiguously Gay son Kirill and also runs a sex-slave ring in addition to his usual criminal activities. He is also the rapist of a 14-year-old girl, having raped her out of disgust when Kirill couldn't do the deed. The girl, Tatiana, later dies in childbirth, and to cover his tracks Semyon tries to have the people looking into Tatiana's case killed and sends Kirill to drown the baby girl—Kirill's own sister.
• Genius Bonus: The attackers in the sauna fight appear to be using exotic knives when in fact they are mundane linoleum knives. Word of God states that if they were ever stopped by police or searched, they could just say they were on their way to a linoleum-cutting job.
• Magnificent Bastard: Nikolai Luzhin is a "cleaner" for the vicious vory v zakone syndicate under the monstrous Semyon. Secretly a mole for the FSB, Nikolai supplants Semyon little by little, becoming a rising star in the syndicate. When Semyon rapes 14-year-old sex slave Tatiana, Nikolai begins working to bring him down, memorizing Tatiana's diary before it is burned and assisting the nurse, Anna, who knows of Tatiana's baby. Helping Anna while setting up Semyon to go down for the rape of Tatiana via paternity testing Tatiana's baby, Nikolai manages to arrange things so his true aim is realized: to become the boss of the syndicate with Semyon gone, keeping Semyon's unstable, deeply closeted son Kirill under his thumb as he rises to the top of the underworld in order to systematically take down the gang and the local organized criminal activity.
• Moral Event Horizon: Semyon ordering the drowning of an infant, his own illegitimate daughter no less, is definitely his.
• Narm: "YOU ARE GOING TO FAHK ONE OF THESE BEETCHES!!!"
• Nightmare Fuel: This is a very unflinching look into the world of the Russian Mafia, and it is not pretty. Graphic throat slashings, a brutal knife fight scene, and Tatiana's story in particular all make for a very realistically disturbing movie.
  • The bathhouse knife fight. It's as brutally realistic as a fight scene can get, and Nikolai manages to kill his attackers in very disturbing ways, like shoving a linoleum knife through their eye.
• Retroactive Recognition: Maester Luwin and Pyp.
  • Made cooler when you realize the movie was cast by Nina Gold, the same woman who cast Game of Thrones. Entirely possible that Maester Luwin and Pyp are played by Donald Sumpter and Josef Altin, respectively, precisely because Nina Gold remembered them from their work here.
  • As of 2013, you can add Tatiana Maslany as the voice of Tatiana.
• Signature Scene: The naked knife fight in the sauna, featuring full frontal nudity from Viggo Mortensen.

---