It's no Videodrome or Naked Lunch but it does the trick as far as the yearly Cronenberg fix is concerned. It has more in common with his more recent stuff. The parallels with History of Violence are imminent so just think of it as a post-soviet Russian-mob version of that. The performances are great as expected and the Russian accents are surprisingly convincing considering the main actors are American, French and German, with the closest thing to Russian being Stepan's character, who's Polish. It's very quiet and subdued until it jumps to shockingly extreme violence. Oh yes, and there's also a full frontal, flailing penis, sauna fight-to-the-death towards the end. Good times.