Anton Corbijn turns Patricia Highsmith’s final year into a cat-and-mouse duel with the young editor sent to resurrect Tom Ripley — and Helen Mirren wins every round she enters.
A Talent for Murder begins with an errand that is really an ambush. Edward Ridgway, a bright young editor at a prestigious New York publishing house, is sent to Switzerland with one job: persuade the reclusive Patricia Highsmith to write one final Tom Ripley novel. Highsmith, played by Helen Mirren as a woman who has weaponized every sentence she owns, has no interest in cooperating. What she has interest in is Edward — specifically, in taking him apart to see what he’s made of. Anton Corbijn’s film, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her own play Switzerland, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 10 and opened in U.S. theaters in limited release on Oct. 23 through Bleecker Street. It runs 106 minutes and is rated R.
The duel is the movie
Strip away the publishing plot and this is a two-hander, and both hands are loaded. Mirren plays Highsmith with what Slant Magazine called “crabbed and precise antagonism” — she is funny, cruel, and visibly delighted to have a worthy opponent in her living room. Alden Ehrenreich matches her with a slipperiness that keeps you guessing which version of Edward is the performance: the eager young fan who has done his homework on every Ripley novel, or something colder that Highsmith recognizes because she invented it. The Cosmic Circus called their exchanges a thrilling two-hander, and FandomWire praised the film as a clever, armrest-grabbing cat-and-mouse game. On that central pleasure, this desk agrees completely: the conversation scenes are staged like fencing matches, and Corbijn — shooting on film with cinematographer Robbie Ryan — keeps the camera on faces as alliances shift mid-sentence. It plays, deliberately, like Hitchcock chamber music.
A Talent for Murder doubles its cast
The film’s boldest device is the story the two of them build together. As Highsmith and Edward sketch the new Ripley plot, it comes alive on screen: Ehrenreich steps into Ripley himself, opposite Olivia Cooke as Clementine Balfour, the heiress whose family Ripley’s killer intends to murder his way through for the inheritance. Cooke is beguiling in the strand — part muse, part mark — and Juliet Stevenson and Brid Brennan add welcome texture around the edges. When the invented story and the real one start reflecting each other, the film finds its real subject: not murder, but authorship. Who owns a character — the woman who created him, or the man who understands him well enough to become him?
Where it wobbles
Not everything lands. The pivotal turn in Edward’s story is telegraphed early enough that the film’s final movement plays as confirmation rather than shock, and the Clementine material, for all Cooke’s charm, never grips like the Swiss duel does. Cryptic Rock, the harshest voice in the roundup, gave the film 2.5 out of 5 stars and argued the Swiss setting is a missed opportunity — beautiful backdrops that never quite become atmosphere — and that the ending falls flat. That is too low, but the complaint about the ending’s temperature is fair: a film this controlled about tension should detonate, and instead it exhales.
Who is it for? Highsmith devotees, Ripley completists, and anyone who believes two great actors talking in a room can be the most violent thing on a screen. Viewers wanting a conventional thriller with conventional payoffs should adjust expectations accordingly.
Verdict: ★★★½ out of 5 — an elegant, witty potboiler carried by two superb performances and a genuine understanding of why Ripley endures; the duel is five-star, the destination is not quite.
Oscar worthy: No. Mirren is magnificent and Ehrenreich finally gets a role that uses all of him, but a telegraphed twist, a split critical response and a limited-release profile keep this out of the Academy’s real conversation — this is a cult conversation piece, not a contender.
The 247 Take — Corbijn has essentially smuggled a sixth Ripley story inside a fake biography, and the audacity of that is the thrill. Highsmith would have hated it, which Slant rightly notes is exactly the point: she guarded Ripley jealously, and watching Mirren’s Highsmith spar with the one man who might steal him is the most Highsmith thing a film about her could do.
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Sources: Slant Magazine (review: Corbijn’s “elegant potboiler,” cast, 106 minutes, R rating, Bleecker Street) | The Cosmic Circus (the two-hander, Robbie Ryan’s cinematography, the story-within-the-story) | FandomWire (plot setup: Edward sent to Switzerland to secure one final Ripley novel) | Cryptic Rock (2.5/5 review: the ending and the underused Swiss setting)
