Film Blitz says The Ninth “begins very impressively”, and the first act earns that. St. Petersburg, late in the nineteenth century, is swept up in a craze for spiritualism and the occult. Girls are snatched off the street. Their mutilated bodies turn up in different corners of the city, and with each one the case gets more tangled for the young police officer Sergey Rostov (Evgeniy Tsyganov) and his assistant Ganin (Dmitriy Lysenkov). A pentagram gives them their first lead. Film Blitz places it on a hard-boiled egg found inside a victim’s chest, while Moria Reviews has it on a stone left in the body; the two accounts disagree on the object and agree on the sign. Rostov then sees the same pentagram on posters for Olivia Reed (Daisy Head), a British medium touring the Russian capital, and the film has its pairing.

Nikolay Khomeriki gives the city plenty to look at. Moria Reviews notes that almost every shot sets the characters against classic buildings or fills the streets with racing black coaches, with figures framed against gargoyles and bodies floating in canals or laid out beside statues. Film Blitz adds that the picture covers the whole social ladder, from the mansions of the elite down to the slums of the poor and the criminal. A period thriller lives or dies on whether its world has more than one floor, and this one has several. The prologue is the odd piece. Moria Reviews describes it as a full-flight Indiana Jones adventure that ventures into a lost desert city, which is a long way from the Petersburg that dominates everything else. Its tone sits apart from the investigation that follows.

Olivia’s entrance is the most striking scene the critics describe. She gives her first public reading in an opera house rather than an ordinary hall, wearing an elaborate black dress and black eyeliner; her hands burst into flame and a circle of fire forms around her, according to Moria Reviews. Film Blitz reads the staging as deliberate: it stresses the show side of the séance while making clear that her gift is real. That makes the next turn hard to accept. Rostov asks her for a private reading and arrests her as a fraud, and Film Blitz finds it odd that a woman with genuine powers chooses to deceive him at all. The partnership that follows rests on that contradiction. Once the two work together, Olivia realises, as Moria Reviews tells it, that the killer is trying to carry out nine human sacrifices at points around the city laid out in the shape of a pentagram, in order to conduct an occult summoning. The title finally has its meaning, and it is a solid hook for a crime story with horror in its blood.

Head carries the film. Film Blitz likes how she conveys a character slightly detached from conventional reality, and it credits the decision to keep her entirely in English. The same decision costs her co-star. Tsyganov performs in a second language opposite her, and Film Blitz puts that performance a couple of notches below his work in Russian. Nobody else makes much of an impression. Yuri Kolokolnikov plays Vasiliy Golitsyn, an amateur occultist, and Lysenkov’s Ganin is the assistant at Rostov’s shoulder, but the supporting players stay in the background. The villain fares worst: Film Blitz finds him underdeveloped until very late in the film.

The structural trouble is one the genre has carried for decades. In a psychic-assists-the-police story, the psychic can produce whatever information the plot needs, simply because she is a psychic. Film Blitz compares it to cinematic amnesia, where memories return at exactly the rate the script requires. The Ninth makes it worse by changing its own rules. Olivia is first explained as someone who receives messages from the spirits of the recently deceased; at the end, living people are suddenly broadcasting to her too, whenever the story needs them to. Film Blitz calls this immensely aggravating and says it kept pulling the reviewer out of the film. Moria Reviews arrives at a similar place from another direction: strip away the stylistic artifice, it argues, and the film follows the same path as other clairvoyant thrillers pairing a detective with a girl who sees things.

What is left is a handsome film with a leaky plot. The city is worth the ticket, and Head makes a fire-throwing medium credible. As a mystery, though, The Ninth has a gripping premise, a ritual with a count built into it, and too little discipline to honour the rules it sets for itself. Film Blitz ends up placing it below average, a serial killer thriller with an occult garnish and convincing period atmosphere. I would go along with that. The streets and Head justify watching it; the case itself does much less.