THE NINTH GATE

Starring Johnny Depp (Ed Wood, MIFF 1995, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow) and directed by the master of all things suspenseful and demonic, Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby). The Ninth Gate is an eerie and darkly humourous film. Depp is Dean Corso, a rare-book dealer who cheats the gullible and skirts the edges of legality and ethics. He is hired by a millionaire collector and scholar of demonology, Boris Balkan (Frank Langella doing his best Christopher Lee), to track down the two remaining copies of a mysterious tome, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows. Published in Venice in 1666, legend has it the book contains engravings adapted from the work of Satan himself. Sent on a hectic mission throughout Europe to meet the two surviving owners, a stately aristocrat in Portugal and a wheelchair-bound Parisian baroness. Corso soon suspects there are powerful forces behind his assignment. Both creepy and fascinating, without resorting to cheesy special effects. Polanski cheekily plays with the horror genre he knows so well. Depp, as a man in a race against time, evokes, according to The San Francisco Examiner, Jack Nicholson in Polanski's Chinatown.