Review of The Ninth Gate (1999) by Noah N — 05 Jul 2013

"The Ninth Gate" has a pretty interesting premise but there's not enough energy in the movie and some of it is just downright nutty. If you're a big fan of horror, not the slasher or ghost type of stories but the occult stuff you know this premise well and it's a good one. Johnny Depp plays Dean Corso an unscrupulous book dealer who specializes in getting rare tomes regardless of the cost. One day he is hired by Boris Balkan to complete an unusual assignment related to a rare book the man has acquired, one that's rumoured to have been co-written by Satan himself. The book is one of only three in existence and supposedly contains the instructions required to summon the devil into our world. Balkan wants his copy compared to the other two to figure out if his is authentic. At first Corso thinks this is just an eccentric hiring him to do an odd job but the closer he gets to the books, the more apparent the danger surrounding them becomes.

A lot of the movie feels uninspired when it comes to the satanic stuff. The cultists you see wear dark red, hooded robes with a pentagram around their neck, Balkan keeps his collection of infernal volumes in a secret room, which you can only access by hitting "666" in the elevator and getting the password (also "666") correct. The fact that there's nothing really new here makes the unseen conspirators feel bland and don't create any tension. What further hinders the film is that our protagonist often doesn't act like a normal human being would. No matter how many dead bodies he sees he never tries to call the police. He never even tries to arm himself with a weapon, even after witnessing murders and being attacked himself. It feels like he never believes that he's in any genuine danger so you don't feel like is either, it leaves you indifferent to his story.

The film also suffers a lot from the fact that it never explains a lot of the important plot elements. Corso meets a mysterious woman with fantastical powers that knows a lot more than she lets on. We never get any explanation of who or what she is, what her objectives are and why she's helping out our protagonist. Having a character who's objectives are mysterious is fine at the beginning to create interest but eventually it simply becomes frustrating. When we do get a comparison between her and a character from the foretold apocalypse we get a hint of who she might be we're never told what the significance of this omen might be. We are never told what the demonic rituals consists of, how to do them or what it really means to be able to accomplish one. The film's conclusion is so open-ended, so vague and abrupt that you feel like just throwing your hands in the air, giving up trying to understand what is playing on the screen and just doing some research after the film is over to try and piece together what you just saw. It's not unheard for a movie to leave you feeling like you want to go out and learn more. In fact, a lot of documentaries will leave you feeling this way because their goal is to inform you and call you to action, so doing research on a real subject is important but here, you'll scour the special features on the Dvd, the synopsis found online and any other material looking for answers and you won't find anything satisfactory.

The film doesn't follow up on the interesting premises introduced and it never conveys that feeling of dread anticipation you should get when someone is trying to summon the prince of darkness. The characters don't act like real people, there aren't really any frightening moments and the ending is such a huge letdown that you'll leave infuriated. The movie starts off pretty interesting, the main protagonist is a nice change of pace from the typical "good guy caught in the wrong place at the wrong time" and there are some scenes that are sexy in a dark sorta perverted way but otherwise there's not much else here. "The Ninth Gate" starts off with a promising idea but just doesn't follow up on it and in the end it's a big confusing letdown. (Dvd, May 23, 2013).