The Ninth Gate (R)
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This was released in 1999, but I didn't see it until 2016. (I think the DVD was given to me by a friend sometime in the late 2000s, so I had it for several years before I got around to watching it.) Anyway, before I watched it, I assumed I'd put my review in either the "scary" or "supernatural" movies section. But as it went on, I became less and less sure about either category. The movie has very little in it that's actually supernatural, and nothing I really found scary at all. It's more of a mystery, and maybe vaguely film noir. But that doesn't seem like the right category, either. I also considered "art" (it is, after all, a film by Roman Polanski). Or just "weird." But ultimately, I decided "meh" was the best fit.

So, there's this guy named Dean Corso, whose job involves tracking down rare and valuable books, which he sells to book dealers or collectors. One of the collectors he sometimes works for, Boris Balkan, has recently acquired one of three surviving copies of a 17th century book called "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows," which was supposedly an adaptation of a book written by the Devil (of which I guess there are no remaining copies). Anyway, Balkan believes only one of the three copies is authentic, and he wants Corso to find out whether or not it's the one he owns. So Corso goes to Spain, and then France, to compare Balkan's copy to the other two, which are each owned by other collectors. He's followed by a mysterious woman whom he'd first seen at a lecture Balkan was giving, just before he was hired. Eventually Corso and the woman begin working together, though he remains suspicious of her, believing she was sent by Balkan to keep tabs on him, I guess. Meanwhile, Corso is also being pursued by Liana Telfer, whose husband had killed himself at the start of the movie. Her husband had sold the book to Balkan the day before he killed himself, but it turns out that the book actually belonged to Liana, and now she wants to get it back. Supposedly, there are engravings within the book that form a sort of puzzle, which if deciphered can be used to summon the Devil, in order to gain great power. So naturally, it's something that both Balkan and Telfer feel is worth killing for... and indeed, several of the people Corso meets in the course of his investigation end up dead.

I guess that's all I want to say about the plot. I will say I had a suspicion about the mysterious woman who worked with Corso, and I think in the end my suspicion turned out to be right (though I can't say for sure; it never really felt explicit, to me). Actually, I had a second idea about the woman, and about Corso, for a direction I would have taken with the story, if I were writing it. But I never thought that idea was likely to be the direction the movie would take, and it didn't. (I won't say what my idea was, but maybe someday I'll write my own story. Or maybe I'll forget all about it. It's not important.) Anyway, from the beginning, I liked the Gothic feel of the movie. Unfortunately, that ended up being pretty much all I liked about it. I kept waiting for it to get really interesting, and it never did. It's the kind of thing that... I didn't exactly find it boring, but it felt like something that I wouldn't blame anyone else for finding boring, or at least a bit tedious. And I wouldn't have minded it being boring, if it ended well. But it didn't. Honestly, I have no idea what the ending was supposed to mean. Or at least... it didn't answer any of my questions. And this is the kind of story that I think absolutely should not leave the viewer with unanswered questions. It seems like the whole point of slogging through the plot is to get to the answers. I'm not even saying I need everything answered, but... to have basically nothing answered renders the whole journey pointless. (I mean, it may not have been pointless for Corso, but it certainly was for me, and probably for most viewers.)