I am watching...

Hitchcock would have liked this movie, or so I would like to believe! The writer writes the book, puts a signature on its cover and reaps the cheers of the readers - if all goes well, that is. But then, imagine a non-writer, a ghost-writer, looming over the book, over someone else's work, in silence and in shadow. There you have it, the main character of the Ghost-Writer, Roman Polanski's latest movie.

Here the ghost-writer does all the dirty job of making a biography more attractive and, like his counterpart in Frantic, he will soon embark on an intricate and thrilling adventure where secret services, politics, business and power unsurprisingly come together to take the lead and use him at their will, like a ridiculous puppet. The destiny of a "regular" human being is all of a sudden intertwined with major decisions made by the mighty ones - not a good equation for the main character, but most certainly a gripping one for the audience.

The movie starts slowly as if a delicate touch was needed to spin the dangerous web of the intrigue... The movie is long, but the result is brilliantly efficient: all the pieces of the puzzle come together to give the viewers a good old thriller that is also enriched with references typical of Polanski's work (the house by the sea is like a trap, water is everywhere to diffuse a sense of threat) as well as of traditional ingredients that cannot fail: murder, sex, manipulation... The ghost-writer meets good and evil, for better or for worse.