The Ninth

In late nineteenth-century St Petersburg, a wave of interest in the occult has made the city fertile ground for a visiting British medium, Olivia Reed, whose public séances draw large crowds. Around the same time, a killer begins abducting young women, leaving their mutilated bodies in different parts of the city in what appear to be ritual murders. A young police officer, Rostov, works the case with his assistant Ganin, and as the victims accumulate the inquiry grows more tangled. Suspicion comes to rest on Olivia, and Rostov approaches her in the hope that her claimed ability to contact the dead can point him toward the killer.

The Ninth is a Russian crime and mystery film directed by Nikolay Khomeriki, whose earlier feature The Icebreaker was released in 2016; this film followed in 2019 and came before his later projects. The screenplay is by Marina Dyachenko, Serhiy Dyachenko and Alexandr Rodionov, with Aleksander Rodnyansky and Sergey Melkumov producing. Yevgeni Tsyganov plays Rostov and Daisy Head plays Olivia, alongside Dmitry Lysenkov, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Jonathan Salway and Evgeniy Tkachuk in a credited cast of thirty-eight. Made for about seven million dollars, it runs ninety-nine minutes. Audience response has been modest: on IMDb it holds 5.4 out of 10 from roughly 1,400 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.3 out of 10 from about 132 votes.