Pluskylang Great Film overall

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

MartinHafer I liked this film because it dared to be different. It was about as far from a "Hollywood-style" film as you can get! The story involves some pretty nasty characters. In particular, a teenage boy and his father. They make money by exploiting illegal immigrants in France--picking up the poor people and housing them in a tenement--all as exorbitant rates. This pair appear to be people without souls as they lie and cheat again and again. However, when one of these illegals accidentally dies, the paths of the two diverge. Dad just wants to dump the body and could care less about the man's widow and young child (wanting to sell her into a life of prostitution), while the boy who witnessed the final words of the dying man promised to look after the family. What, exactly, happened next I'll leave for the viewer. Provided you have a tolerance for movies about realistically seedy people, this is a film worth seeing.An interesting twist, not taken in the film, would have been if later the boy had found out that his father was not really his biological dad--but the "dad" raised him from infancy after his own real family died while being smuggled into France by him. This could be an interesting path.

jandesimpson The first ten minutes were not exactly promising! I remember thinking, another hand-held camera job, this time set in the backstreets of a Belgian industrial city - yet another rite of passage tale - unprepossessing youth steals a pensioner's handbag from a car in the garage where he works, while his father, a squint-eyed, piggy-faced fatty, runs a racket fleecing illegal immigrants from the Balkans and Africa. However what is wholly remarkable about "La Promesse" is the way it slowly sucks the viewer into a realisation that this is not just a piece of documentary-style realism but an uncompromisingly honest study of character and conscience. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that no other film new to British TV last year moved or excited me as much. The performance by Jeremie Renier as the youth Igor is a tour-de-force. He is on screen for practically the entire film and it is his search for integrity after a dying African (one of his father's "clients") exacts from him a promise to assist his wife and baby, that forms the work's core. Igor has to come to terms with alienating his father, who, although a selfish and dishonest brute, has real affection for his son; parental/filial warmth is displayed when they drunkenly sing together in a cafe. But what the film finally says with such devestating certainly is that even integrity is something that can go unappreciated and ignored by the one towards whom it is intended. The ending speaks of a terrible price paid for redemption.

Moira Rose This film was a gem and I look forward to seeing "Rosetta" by the same filmmakers, although I missed it back in '99.The story has a gritty documentary feel in its depiction of lower-class immigrant experience in Belgium, but nonetheless is dramatically compelling because of the tension between the father and the son. I haven't seen this side of modern European urban life treated in film this well.

George Parker "La Promesse", from the makers of "Rosetta", is an award winning drama which gets down to business quickly. The film is shot with no frills and the hard edge of a documentary. It tells of a father and son, both of questionable character, who make their living on the backs of transient illegal aliens in Belgium and the schism which developes between them as they engage a serious matter of conscience. Viewers with an appetite for reality in film will extol this flick while fantasy lovers may hate its grit.