The Ninth Gate

Roman Polanski may well be your director of choice if you were producing an up-market thriller about devil-worshipping, but from this film you can only conclude that his strength is with the covert menace that hides behind the mundane, so iconically realized by him with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and definitely not with the kind of conventional sensationalist material he is working with here.

Based on a book,'The Club Dumas', by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the film has Johnny Depp as Dean Corso, a rare books dealer who is hired by a wealthy diabolist and book collector, Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to compare the latter’s copy of 'The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows', a 17th century occult treatise supposedly co-written by Lucifer, with the only two known copies in existence one in France, one in Spain.

Did Polanski make this film half-asleep or perhaps even with derision for the project? Such questions one asks as it progresses. Depp makes for an unlikely antiquarian book dealer and on any level the way that the book in question, supposedly of great rarity and worth $1m, is handled defies belief. From a curatorial point of view the best treatment it gets is to be wrapped in a bit of old cloth but most of the time it is pawed like an old paperback, whilst, as the plot thickens and it becomes clear that the book is sought after by ruthless ne’er-do-wells, Corso continues to lug it around in his shoulder bag.

The film plods along as Depp fulfills his allotted tasks but in its nether parts it shifts gear with Polanski, having up to this point having painted a fairly staid picture doing the equivalent of throwing a pot of paint at the canvas, with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, as an enigmatic student, martial arts expert and apparently gifted with the ability to fly, who has been following Depp/Corso on his assignment, having mind-blowing sex with Depp/Corso whilst in the background the devil-worshipping book-collector is immolated in a burning castle after having torched himself in a failed test of his satanic powers.

The Ninth Gate has a tip-top production team and looks splendid but fails to even remotely convince.

 

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