Patricia Highsmith spent her career writing men who could kill you and then have lunch. “A Talent for Murder” puts Helen Mirren in her chair, alone in a Swiss house full of cats and antique weapons, and sends a young man up the mountain to ask her for one more Tom Ripley novel. The trailer landed Friday, and the pitch it makes is delicious: what happens when the woman who invented the charming psychopath meets one in her own kitchen?
Anton Corbijn directs, which is the first thing worth flagging. Corbijn made “Control” and “A Most Wanted Man”, he came out of photography, and he shoots cold rooms and closed faces better than almost anyone working. This is a chamber piece about two people circling each other in a house, so that is either perfect casting for a director or a warning that the whole thing lives or dies on the performances. Given who is in it, we will take the bet.
What happens when the woman who invented the charming psychopath meets one in her own kitchen?”
Mirren plays Highsmith. Alden Ehrenreich is Edward Ridgeway, the emissary sent by her publisher to secure the final Ripley book. Olivia Cooke plays Clementine Balfour and Juliet Stevenson plays Peggy. The script comes from Joanna Murray-Smith, adapting her own 2014 stage play “Switzerland”, which is the detail that explains the shape of the thing. This is not a biopic and it is not based on a true story. It is a fiction that borrows a real writer and imagines a visitor she never had. Highsmith takes that treatment well, because the actual record already reads like something somebody invented. She published “Strangers on a Train” in 1950 and Hitchcock had filmed it inside a year. She wrote “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1955 and then went back to him four more times across four decades. She also wrote “The Price of Salt” under a pseudonym, the novel that eventually reached the screen as “Carol”, and she spent her last years with a reputation for being famously difficult company. The trailer leans on that reputation hard.
The trailer plays the setup straight for about thirty seconds and then starts turning. Highsmith is holed up in her Swiss retreat, surrounded by animals and blades, and she has no interest in writing anything for anyone. Ridgeway will not leave. What follows in the cut footage is a series of escalating tests: a breakfast being prepared with poison in plain view of the camera, and later a shot of Ridgeway waking with a wound on his neck. Somewhere in the middle the two of them start collaborating, working out a perfect murder together as a creative exercise, on the understanding that if he can invent one good enough she might write it.
The smartest thing in the trailer is that it refuses to tell you who the predator is. Every frame is built so it reads two ways. Is she torturing a naive young man for entertainment, the way she did to characters for forty years? Or has a genuine Ripley walked into her house wearing a publisher’s errand as a disguise, and she is the only person alive equipped to recognise him? It is cut to Space’s “Female of the Species”, which is a very funny needle drop for a film about a woman who might be the dangerous one.
There is a real thematic idea underneath the thriller mechanics, and it is the reason this premise has survived from stage to screen. Highsmith’s whole body of work argues that the capacity for murder is ordinary, that Ripley is not a monster but a man with unusually few brakes, and that the rest of us are separated from him by circumstance rather than character. A film that traps her in a house with somebody who has taken that argument personally is doing something more interesting than a whodunnit. It is asking a writer to live inside her own thesis.
The practical details: LD Entertainment and Brouhaha Entertainment produced, Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment handle the US release, and it opens in cinemas on October 23. It premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival first, though we have only seen one source put a specific date on that screening so we are leaving the day off until somebody else confirms it. Highsmith died in 1995, which places the story at the very end of her life and gives the whole thing the flavour of a last argument.
Our honest reservation is the one that applies to every prestige two-hander: trailers for these films are always excellent, because a trailer is exactly long enough to promise a psychological duel and not long enough to have to deliver one. A hundred minutes of Mirren and Ehrenreich circling each other in a Swiss farmhouse will either be the best thing either of them has done in years or it will run out of moves in the second act. But Corbijn has never made a film that looked cheap or thought small, and Mirren playing a woman who has spent her life imagining how to get away with it is not a role you pass up. There is also the matter of how crowded the Ripley shelf has become. Alain Delon played him in 1960, Dennis Hopper and John Malkovich took their turns, Matt Damon defined him for a generation in 1999, and Andrew Scott stripped him back to something colder and stranger in Netflix’s black and white series. A film about the woman who built him, arriving after all of that, has one real advantage: it does not have to compete with any of those performances. It only has to be interesting about where he came from. That is a lower bar than it sounds and a harder one to clear than it looks. Plenty of films have tried to explain a famous character by explaining the author, and most of them end up flattening both into a tidy piece of psychology. The trailer at least suggests Corbijn can see the trap, since it spends its time making Highsmith less legible rather than more.
What Do You Think? Is a fictional encounter a fair way to dramatise a real writer, or does putting invented events on Highsmith’s last years take a liberty she would have hated? Can a two-hander sustain a whole feature, or does this work better as the stage play it started life as? And who do you think the trailer is actually setting up as the dangerous one?
See you on the next binge!
