"The Ninth Gate" is everything you would
dare to hope for from Roman "foreboding" Polanski and
the highly enigmatic Johnny Depp. Both are in superb form as the
movie draws you into a very sinister tale of well-helled occult
aficionados and their their pursuit of the satanic Holy Grail.
Kind of like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for grown-ups.
Or "Eyes Wide Shut" with action.
This movie does an excellent job creating the eerie, otherworldly atmosphere of the antique book culture. Depp is perfectly cast as Dean Corso, a stoic and unscrupulous but highly knowledgeable and ruthlessly effective book hunter. At first, his main motivation is cold hard cash, but eventually his fascination with the subject matter gets the better of him. His client, Boris Balkan (very convincingly played by Frank Langella) is a much more ruthless man with seemingly unlimited resources... and an unwavering obsession for the occult object of Dean's assignment.
The props and the sets are so meticulous, you can practically smell the 400 year old leather and taste the expensive bourbon (which seems to become the only refuge for Dean as the plot continues to thicken). The rural countryside settings in Portugal, Spain and France are authentic and devastatingly beautiful. There are no cheesy generic Hollywood sound stage locales to be found in this flick.
After having witnessed some 10,000 onscreen deaths (about average for a person of my age), I was still caught off guard by some of the things I saw in this film, and the way in which they were shown to me. Polanski has used all of his skill and imagination to spin a yarn that is many, many notches above your standard suspense / horror fare. When I left the theater, I felt as if the story had really happened, somewhere out there in the lush hills of Southern France.
Needless to say, I endorse this movie wholeheartedly. Please: before you give your money to that great big special effects jerk-off known as "Mission to Mars", go throw Roman Polanski a bone and reward his good work.