The immigrant experience takes on a blacker-than-black hue in director David Cronenberg's masterful tale of Russian mafiosi in London.

Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, a driver-cum-fixer for Semyon (Mueller-Stahl), a cultured restaurateur whose twinkly eyes belie a cold ruthlessness.

Semyon has just been approached by midwife Anna (Watts) to translate a diary found in the paltry possessions of a young Russian girl who died during childbirth.

Immediately, you sense that the courtly old gent is probably not the best choice...and so it proves.

Semyon, we learn, is the head of a Russian mafia family - Vory V Zakone or "thieves in law" - working its money-laundering operation from the baroque dining room, Trans Siberian.

His son Kiril - a splendidly manic Vincent Cassel - breaks bones at a drop of a plate of borscht in a overdone attempt to blank out his latent homosexuality.

At his impulsive whim is Nikolai's still, brooding, macho presence: he is the man you figure Semyon really wishes he had as a son.

However, this still doesn't stop him selling him down the river when the cocksure (perhaps not the right phrase) Kiril upsets some rival Ukrainian gangsters.

Director David Cronenberg's diamond-hard narrative is shot through with a bleak air of menace and sparkles malevolently thanks to a performance of lean economy from Mortensen.

Standout scenes include a heart-stoppingly brutal knife fight in an East End Turkish baths and an icy evocation of genial evil from Mueller-Stahl.

It may get tied up a little too neatly by the end but by then the terrifyingly tattooed mafia cult thriving in England's midst will have chilled you to the core.

This delivers on its promises.

Tim Evans