Pun Salad

So with Mrs. Salad out of town, I figured I might as well check out a movie she would have absolutely no desire to see, no way, nohow. And this one fit the bill pretty well. Set in London, it begins with some pretty unpleasant deaths, one guy getting an unusually close shave at his barber's, and a young girl dying in childbirth.

Naomi Watts plays Anna, the attending midwife in the latter death; she gets intrigued by the dead girl's Russian diary, and develops an attachment to the healthy baby. This combination draws her into investigating further, and—guess what?—before you know it, she's hobnobbing with some of the people involved in the barbershop murder. Prime among these folks is enigmatic Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen; he's "just a driver" for the Russian mob. He sends out waves of bemused lethality, but seems to like Anna, who's both frightened and attracted by him, etc.

Before I went to the movie, it was #235 in IMDB's top 250 movies of all time. By the time I got back, it had dropped out. Funny.

I was the only person in the theatre for the showing.

There are a couple of Shocking Plot Twists near the end of the movie, and (I must admit) I didn't see either one coming.

It's rated R for "strong brutal and bloody violence, some graphic sexuality, language and nudity, some involving Viggo Mortensen's wiener." You might want to take that into account when deciding whether to take this one in.