By DENNIS LIM

Like many films in the career of Roman Polanski, “The Ghost Writer,” his 18th feature, is likely to be overshadowed by the man who made it.

Critics and viewers have long been tempted to link Mr. Polanski’s work to his life - to view one through the prism of the other - not least because the life has been so public and so uncommonly eventful. “There’s nothing about human nature that would surprise him,” the novelist Robert Harris, a co-writer of “The Ghost Writer,” said recently. “He’s a sort of walking microcosm of history.”

Mr. Polanski’s biography could double as a summary of the 20th century. Born in 1933, he spent part of his boyhood scrambling to stay alive in the Krakow ghetto. He was reunited with his father after the war, but his mother died at Auschwitz. A precocious actor , he started plotting his escape from Communist Poland at a young age. His award-winning early films were his ticket out, and he arrived in London on the eve of the Swinging ‘60s.

He made it to the United States in time for the summer of love, only to become a tragic symbol of the end of the ‘60s, when his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four other people were slaughtered by followers of Charles Manson. The counterculture hangover continued . In 1977 Mr. Polanski pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a 13-yearold girl. Last September, more than 31 years after he fled Los Angeles to escape sentencing, he was arrested in Zurich by Swiss authorities. But on February 12, the Swiss ministry of Justice announced that he would not be extradited to the United States until the courts in Los Angeles determined whether or not he would need to face sentencing in person.

He came to prominence as part of the European art cinema of the ‘60s: “Knife in the Water” (1962), his poised first feature about the triangle among a married couple and a young hitchhiker, earned an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film. In America he directed “Chinatown,” one of the crowning achievements of Hollywood’s most recent golden age.

Based on “The Ghost,” a best-selling 2007 novel by Mr. Harris, “The Ghost Writer” unfolds from the point of view of a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) hired to whip into shape the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), a Tony Blair-like American ally under investigation for war crimes.

Watching this twisty thriller - which for long stretches finds Mr. McGregor’s character sequestered in a Massachusetts beach house in the dead of winter - it is hard not to note that the film was completed by its director while confined under house arrest to his own chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland.

It’s also tempting to observe that Mr. Polanski used a ghostwriter (the journalist Edward Behr) for his 1984 autobiography, “Roman by Polanski.” “The Ghost Writer” is Mr. Polanski’s first post-exile film to be largely - and pointedly - set in the United States. It was shot on the German coast and on a Berlin soundstage.

The film, which premiered in Berlin on February 12 , gives us a quintessentially Polanskian me-againstthe- world setup, in which an isolated protagonist succumbs to increasing paranoia. In Mr. Polanski’s movies paranoia can be a symptom of madness (“Repulsion”) or the only proof of sanity in a crazy world (“Rosemary’s Baby”). Sometimes it appears to be both, as in “The Tenant” (1976). In that film, both a black comedy about French xenophobia and a split-identity psychodrama, Mr. Polanski plays the title character, a Pole who rents an apartment in Paris and comes to suspect that his neighbors are conspiring to turn him into its previous resident, a woman who threw herself out of her window. Mr. McGregor’s unnamed character in “The Ghost Writer” is also haunted by his dead predecessor: the writer he’s replacing drowned under mysterious circumstances.

It is in keeping with the unpredictable turns of Mr. Polanski’s life that his current unhappy chapter should come after “The Pianist,” a stately late-career triumph that many considered a culminating work. The stories of his brutal on-set perfectionism had been replaced by a picture of a marginalized but respected industry elder whom journalists and collaborators have described as reticent and not especially prone to introspection. (He has been married for more than 20 years to the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children.)

Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for his screenplay of “The Pianist,” has been in regular contact with Mr. Polanski by telephone these past few months.

“I ask him how he is, and he says he’s fine,” Mr. Harwood said. “But I don’t know how he is. No one really does.”