What makes someone interested in and qualified to write about a brutal killing and the psychology that goes into it? Authors and screenwriters tend to win acclaim for crafting dark dramas, thrillers, and horror films about evil, sadistic criminals who take pleasure in robbing innocents of their lives and family members and friends of their loved ones. Though the motives for his crimes are up for debate, Tom Ripley ranks among the best-written and conceived villains of both literature and film. A Talent for Murder tangentially revisits this classic character with a story of the author who conceived him and the young literary agent sent to convince her to bring him back out of retirement for one last caper.
Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) arrives from New York in Switzerland, sent by his agency to find Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren), the reclusive author of the Ripley series who has been unresponsive at best and downright threatening at worst to his predecessors who have attempted to fulfill the same mission. Though she’s initially cold and unwilling to even hear him out, sharing enough of his personal backstory convinces her that he’s an outsider who deserves at least a modicum of a chance. Her challenge is that he help her write the next chapter, tapping into what drives this killer and the way in which he hatches his plan to worm his way into his mark’s life and then construct a foolproof alibi before committing his crime.
Though Ripley is the impetus for Ridgeway’s trip and amounts to a significant portion of what the two main characters discuss throughout the film, he doesn’t actually appear on screen. Instead, Ridgeway himself stands in for the protagonist, imagining himself preparing for a murder. Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), the woman he meets on the train on his way in, becomes his mark, and scenes of them meeting and falling for each other (or at least, Balfour falling for Ridgeway’s game) are soon intertwined with the two real people seeing each other, to the point where they become, quite deliberately, indistinguishable.
While that device does prove interesting and serves as a creative vantage point from which to weave a narrative, it also means that this film can’t be quite as engaging as dramatizations of Highsmith’s work. While the most famous of her Ripley stories, The Talented Mr. Ripley, features many scenes of just two people talking to build tension, this film features very few characters altogether, leaning heavily on the Highsmith-Ridgeway interactions to carry the plot forward. The exchanges are well-written and involve a good deal of introspective analysis, but they’re not riveting enough to sustain a thriller about murder, more equipped as the bias for an essay about writing a competent story about a layered main character.
Mirren could play just about any role in her sleep and still deliver something worthwhile, and she is having some fun here chewing scenery as a woman known for her expressed hatred of most people, leading to a few memorable biting monologues enhanced by her added sardonic wit. Ehrenreich has a tougher act to navigate as someone who at first appears subservient but soon reveals a fiercer and more forceful side of Ridgeway, reminiscent of the best parts of his performances in Fair Play and Oppenheimer. Though her role is quite small, Cooke is always terrific and makes Balfour alluring and mysterious enough while also infusing her with intelligence to be more than just a helpless target of someone else’s manipulation. Adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her play Switzerland, this slow-burn character-driven thriller is similar in pace to director Anton Corbijn’s past films The American and A Most Wanted Man, building to a grand finale that unfortunately isn’t as emphatic as it wants to be.
Movie Rating: 6/10
