Any feature hailing from Roman Polanski is guaranteed to stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy and conversation, but even if we put the contentious filmmaker’s personal history to one side, it’s hard to fathom why his 1999 supernatural thriller The Ninth Gate has remained so enduringly popular since it was first released.
That’s not to say it’s a horrendous work of cinema, even if quite a lot of people would disagree with that sentiment, but the convoluted story and undercooked narrative spiraling into nonsensical twists, ludicrous turns, and a decidedly meandering tone across an overlong 133 minutes hardly paints the picture of a classic.
The Ninth Gate earned less than $60 million at the box office on a $38 million budget, wound up with critical and user scores of 43 and 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a 44 rating on Metacritic, and a slightly above-average 6.7/10 IMDb audience average. Those are relentlessly mediocre numbers, so does the film deserve the praise it’s been getting on Reddit?
Johnny Depp does admittedly deliver a reliably strong performance in the lead role of Dean Corso, a rare book collector who stumbles headlong into a demonic conspiracy when he ends up being tasked to track down the titular tome, which is rumored to contain the power to summon the Devil.
Over-indulgent to a fault, the climactic third act showdown ends up devolving into nonsensical territory, and in true Polanski fashion, the Oscar winner ended up being sued by now-defunct studio Artisan Entertainment following The Ninth Gate‘s release, after being accused of siphoning more than a million dollars from the production budget for his own personal gain.