The movie is The Ninth Gate. Came out in 2000. Johnny Depp was in it. Roman Polanski directed it. Almost everyone I know of dismissed it….. When the credits rolled at the end my friends just groaned and got up to leave…. I sat still…. Felt like I’d just seen a part of the back of my mind projected onto the big screen…. I don’t have time to write more at the moment…… But more is coming………….
***days go by***
…..aaaaaaaaaaaand we’re back…..
….like I wrote in one of the comments below, it doesn’t surprise me that many people have such a low opinion of this movie… But it also doesn’t surprise me that I’m not the only who’s a fan… In lieu of an actual blog about it, I’ll just give you some bullet points…
1. What I thought this film did SO well was depict the experience of contact with something not human… So often, gods and demons and other supernatural forces are presented distinctly like us… In this film, the being in question is presented, subtly, as distinctly NOT like us…
2….and even when it IS kind of heavy-handed (morphing effect), there’s still a real kind of quiet about it… The eyes, for instance… It wasn’t obvious right away… And the floating was done so quietly, no big Matrix moment of heroic athleticism… Just matter-of-fact, as if this was simply what this being did… Finally, the posture and gait of this being… It was obvious that the body was being used as a vessel…. To me, anyway…. I thought it was a great touch…
3. What makes The Ninth Gate so different than most other “supernatural thrillers” is that there really isn’t much effort made one way or another to characterize Satan, or Evil… No howling, fiery monsters… No brooding fallen angels… No vengeful rebellious figures… No debonair, darkly seductive men… No lusty sirens, either… In fact there’s almost nothing in the way of sadism present…
4… and I think that’s really the point… You can see it in Johnny Depp’s face towards the end… He truly has no idea what he’s gotten himself into, and he has no frame of reference whatsoever for what is sitting on top of him… Same goes for what he’s walking into in the last shot before the credits… That’s what I love about this movie… Its illustration of the moments leading up to contact with the unknown, and then when that contact is made… While Depp’s character’s motives are all too human, the motives and concerns he is unwittingly expediting are quite inhuman, and, inherently, therefore unknowable to us…
5…. so the only thing that IS knowable is the dread, the sensation that something is not quite right…. Though, for whosoever actually inhabits this pre-human (or is it post-human) realm, it is COMPLETELY sensible… There’s a big part of the musical score, one recurring theme, and it really reflects that “business as usual”, unassuming sense of evil… A lot of movie music gets in the way of the important themes, I think… This refrain makes sure you keep going in the same direction as the theme…