The Ninth Gate is a 1999 French-Spanish-American thriller film directed, produced, and co-written by Roman Polanski. The plot involves a rare book business, wherein rare-book dealer Dean Corso is hired by bibliophile Boris Balkan to validate a seventeenth-century copy of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, by Aristide Torchia, and what he encounters en route. The Nine Gates is an imaginary book, but is heavily inspired by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
The film, based upon Arturo Pérez-Reverte's 1993 novel The Club Dumas, comprises three genres, and was co-written by director Roman Polanski. The premiere showing was at San Sebastián, Spain, on 25 August 1999, a month before the 47th San Sebastian International Film Festival; in North America, it failed critically and commercially, because, reviewers claimed, it was a lesser effort than Rosemary's Baby (1968), his best supernatural-theme film; nonetheless, The Ninth Gate earned a worldwide gross of $58.4 million against a $38 million budget.
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