The Ninth Gate

Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate is a flawed film that improves with age. I dismissed it in 1999. I was wrong.

Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso, an unscrupulous rare book dealer hired to authenticate a tome supposedly penned by Satan himself. The job takes him from New York to Portugal to Paris. Bodies pile up. The skeptic becomes a believer.

This isn’t Rosemary’s Baby redux. It’s not Chinatown either. Polanski has blended both into something stranger—a hard-boiled noir where the MacGuffin is a gateway to hell.

Frank Langella steals the film as Boris Balkan, the wealthy collector who hires Corso. “There’s nothing more reliable than a man whose loyalty can be bought with hard cash,” he purrs. Later, he crashes a Satanic orgy bellowing “Mumbo jumbo, MUMBO JUMBO!” as he storms the altar. Langella modulates from whisper to roar with perfect control. He and Polanski are in complete sync.

Less so with Depp, whose performance is curiously muted. He plays Corso flat, neither sleazy enough nor colorful enough. You sense neither actor nor director quite nailed down the character. They played it safe. A more vulpine approach—think Hammett’s Sam Spade—would have served the character better.

More problematic is Emmanuelle Seigner as “the girl,” an enigmatic figure who shadows Corso. Polanski cast his wife in a role clearly written for someone a decade younger. Depp’s Corso mistakes her for a student, which tells you everything. The 21-year-old Seigner of Polanski’s Frantic would have been perfect. The 33-year-old Seigner of 1999 doesn’t quite fit the wardrobe or the concept.

The effects don’t help. Wire work meant to make Seigner float down stairs looks cheap. All the New York scenes were shot against rear projection in Europe. The result is stagey and artificial, particularly in an early scene where Langella delivers that great “hard cash” line against a laughably fake cityscape.

Yet the film surprises. The central mystery boils down to an elaborate game of spot-the-difference, but Polanski’s tonal blend of absurdist black comedy and genuine horror works. Not as well as Rosemary’s Baby, but close. Along the way, he creates a marvelous hangout movie. We follow Corso through dusty estates, musty bookshops, vast libraries. He chain-smokes Lucky Strikes, knocks back Johnnie Walker Black, and holds our sympathy despite having zero redeemable qualities beyond his obsession with rare books.

There’s something captivating about those environments, about reaching into the past through ancient volumes. At just over two hours, the film should drag. It doesn’t.

The Ninth Gate isn’t perfect. But I find myself returning to it more than any other Polanski film. That counts for something.