How Cronenberg and Screenwriter Steven Knight Kept You Sitting on The Edge of Your Seat by Creating Tension in “Eastern Promises”

I recently rewatched David Cronenberg’s excellent “Eastern Promises” from 2007. Even though I liked it when I first saw it years ago, this time I was struck by how well structured the movie is — especially in the first part of the movie.

The screenplay is written by Steven Knight and you can see from reading it see that the structure stems from his writing. Cronenberg made many small changes to the screenplay but the structure remains from Knight’s work.

In the screenplay, Knight utilizes a simple and subtle narrative trick that, for me at least, was brilliant in keeping the suspense throughout the first half of the movie.

The diary

The protagonist, Anna (played by Naomi Watts) is a midwife at a hospital in central London and one day a young woman dies in her ward while giving birth to a baby girl. The young woman has no identification papers on her but she did carry a diary with her. The problem is that the diary is written in Russian.