In The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s chilly new thriller, rain clouds converge over Martha’s Vineyard in the way that sunlight loomed over L.A. in Chinatown. Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, has fallen from grace and retreated into writing his memoirs; but the initial ghostwriter has drowned, and his vacancy haunts the feet that fill his shoes (Ewan McGregor). The newb arrives just as the International Criminal Court charges the P.M. with crimes against humanity; through rendition, Lang allowed terror suspects to be tortured by the C.I.A. Over the course of the narrative, the popular hack writer grows a political pair, and follows in his predecessor’s gumshoe footsteps. But cognizance has its consequences.

The Ghost Writer is based on a speculative novel by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the script with Polanski. Lang is a shadow of Tony Blair, just as this movie is in the shadow of Chinatown. But this damp, penumbral cool is just the shade the filmmakers needed. This thriller is suffused with subtle disquietude; it soaks through the performances and gives the scenery both rainy-day enchantment and despair. Rooms with open doors that the camera does not enter wreathe with mystery like a beckoning spectral hand. Pawel Edelman’s cinematography makes a billionaire’s state-of-the-art beach house seem abstract and derelict; yet, when pale emanations of daylight seep into the interiors, there’s a kinship between these images and the earthy, inviting melancholy of old Dutch paintings. (Alexandre Desplat’s cuckoo-Andrew Bird glockenspiel pings have a similar effect.) The film’s P.M. used to work on Downing Street; he’s flanked by reporters and trucked to Capitol Hill for the sake of P.R. But most of the action takes place on a shoreline during the off season—an isle of lost souls and shut-ins. Unlike the tempests that plagued nearby Shutter Island, Polanski’s storms are always incipient, always on the horizon. The dangers are impersonal; they loom in the distance. Take, for example, a scene in which McGregor pays a visit to one of Lang’s classmates from Cambridge—Tom Wilkinson, of course—whose old New English manse is tucked in the russet, viny woods of Eastern Massachusetts. The C.I.A.-connected old boy’s wife telephones someone about the writer’s arrival, as if he was expected. Polanski frames her in the background, just far enough away to notice that her dress seems strangely out of date; but her face is as indistinct as the party she’s calling.

In the past, Polanski’s camera would sneak up on its subject; it swiveled around and peeped from unexpected places. In The Ghost Writer, the director’s compositions have the naked strength and clarity of an old John Huston movie. One long take of a note being passed from one hand to another looks like an homage to Hitchcock. But one of the wittiest pirouettes—a squirrel nabs McGregor’s attention and shifts his glance to a car that’s tailing him (in the middle of nowhere, and in the background, of course)—made my heart aflutter with vintage Polanski. What’s more, this shot is a beautiful demonstration of the movie’s collusive universe. Technically and psychologically, this film is as deft, cold, and sophisticated as Wilkinson’s Yalie intonations.

Like the hitchhiker in Knife in the Water, McGregor’s ghostwriter isn’t dignified with a name. This proffers more than the low opinion that writers often have for themselves (J.K.!); the writer is out of his depth in the exclusive sphere of ruling élites, just as the hitchhiker was unready for bourgeois pettiness. It takes a dubious mettle that these naïfs lack; and Lang—to some extent—is short on it, too. But McGregor’s no naïf; the scribbler seethes—his books are bestsellers, yet he views himself as a failure—and the actor sharpens the knives that the scriptwriters hand him with an edge of self-disgust. (The dialogue is smart and spiky, if not quite on par with Robert Towne’s Chinatownastiness. Then again, what is?) McGregor is better served here than he was in a comparable role in The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was made by a neophyte director. (Polanski’s been at it since 1962.) And, just as nobody expects much intellectual acumen from a photogenic smiler like Lang, one may be surprised to see a dashing former Bond seem so easily overbearing. Brosnan gives Lang the what-the-hell-happened disgust of someone you’d happily have a beer with, but who shouldn’t have been elected to public office. Sound familiar?

Despite all the Hillary Clintons out there, the world of this picture still exposes politics as a big boys’ game; but The Ghost Writer pays its dues to The Manchurian Candidate. Men wear the crown and women hold the scepter. As Lang’s stalwart assistant, Kim Cattrall is quite good; she’s quite better as a counterpoint to Lang’s wife Ruth (Olivia Williams). Williams suffered through a booby-trapped role in An Education, but here—occupying a part that was intended for Tilda Swinton (it shows)—she’s re-clawed and given to leonine fierceness; this alternates with a sort of hysterical sensitivity that she shows off to the ghostwriter like a battle scar. When a woman behaves like this to a man it has the same intended result of a man’s displaying his war wounds to a woman, so you know the writer’s in trouble. But he’s been properly spooked. He might as well be saying, “First Lady Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.” Sex—and romantic attachments, in general—are never no-strings-attached in the directorial corpus that gave birth to Rosemary’s baby. In this mature work, the strands are especially fine and silky; Ruth’s intentions are a few degrees more opaque than Elaine’s sex-starved MILF’s.

Given its conclusions, one might call The Ghost Writer more courageous than Chinatown, but I don’t think it’s more audacious. Whether the filmmakers’ assertions are crazy or crazily sane is up for grabs; but one can walk out of the theater fairly certain that Polanski’s view of America hasn’t improved much in 36 years. (With all this man’s troubles, the revelation isn’t much of a newsflash.) Is it possible, however, that our collective anti-Americanism has stagnated since then—or, given the turbulence of the last decade (yet unnamed, like our loose-lipped hero), that we’ve looped back to the Watergate-spurred turmoil of 1974? These filmmakers make inquiries Frost/Nixon didn’t dare to; but their questions, and their implications, may be too ripe to answer—and I am probably not ripe enough to hazard them. One thing’s for sure: If you think The Ghost Writer will conclude with the storm clouds breaking and giving way to sunshiny rainbows, Forget it, Jake. It’s Polanski-town.