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The Ninth Gate (1999)

Reviewed by Carl
Posted on August 10, 2005 
Filed Under The Occult

In light of his excellent Rosemary’s Baby, a film which brings together Roman Polanski, Johnny Depp and Lucifer naturally invites high expectations. You’ll be consistently under-whelmed though, as The Ninth Gate offer up the promise of an edgy, compelling and suspenseful little movie and instead delivers a flaccid and unemotional tale that limps woefully on to its disappointing conclusion.

Polanski aims to give us a high-brow passage into the realm of evil by making our companions intellectuals and wealthy occult enthusiasts. This might help give his premise a little more feasibility but it strips it entirely of its tension and suspense. Cold, objective discussions about the coming reign of darkness, conducted in beautifully endowed libraries, strip that prospect of its inherent terror and relegate it to the level of a bad history lecture. It would be excusable if Polanski had crafted a tighter script but instead we’re expected to make do with a series of set-piece rambles from a group of characters that have no real depth and whose earnest looks and pleas to Depp to proceed with caution understandably fall on deaf ears. Each owner of ‘The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows’ seems to know exactly what the book contains (as will any semi-perceptive viewer within the first twenty minutes) and the nature of its powers, which makes the quasi-intellectual framing of Depp’s quest at best annoying and at worse ineffectually snobbish (and off putting in either case)

The number of pointless strands to the movie does nothing to help focus minds on the central story. The revelation that the secret society which grew up to protect the book has descended into nothing more than a dogging gang for the rich and famous is a nice touch but jars massively when Polanski then tries to refocus minds on how terribly serious the plot is. The hunt around Europe for the other copies of the book is also unnecessarily elaborate and you get the feeling that its there just to please the American audience who like to look at pretty buildings and think devil worship is more likely to occur in ancient buildings and (excuse the ‘Rumsfeld-ism’) ‘Old Europe’. The end - and the final showdown with Lucifer himself – is devastatingly disappointing; it’s not just he doesn’t appear (sorry to spoil the plot but I’m doing you a favour) that rankles; it’s the fact that you actually won’t care by this stage.

There are one or two salvageable aspects of The Nine Gates. Johnny Depp is as excellent as ever as our unscrupulous book-tracking hero. Indeed, he seems to feed off the confused direction of the plot and you’re unsure which way he’s going to jump right until the very end. His dispassion frequently crosses over into indifference at what’s going on around him, and in this he provides a more effective figure of empathy for the audience than Polanski intended him to be as they will be feeling pretty similar. He is probably the only saving grace in this disappointing and rather pointless film, and if you’re after a truly intelligent look at Lucifer stick with Faust.

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