Cat-and-mouse thriller A Talent for Murder is a meta deep-dive into Patricia Highsmith’s body of work
Courtesy Bleecker Street
Helen Mirren is all over the promotional material for A Talent for Murder, which makes sense. The idea of the steely, nastily fun Mirren playing Patricia Highsmith, the steely, nastily fun author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, in a film directed by the uber-stylish Anton Corbijn (his first in over a decade), is incredibly attractive. You don’t even really need a trailer, that logline sells itself.
However, as impressive as Mirren’s portrayal is, it’s not A Talent for Murder’s biggest strength. That honor goes to Alden Ehrenreich, who proves he’s more than up to the task of embodying Highsmith’s famously shifty leading men and keeping up with her twisty stratagems. Like Highsmith’s stories themselves, watching A Talent for Murder is an experience teeming with icky surprises, even if you can ultimately call some of them pretty early on.
We meet Mirren’s Highsmith in 1995, living out the last months of her life in a remote house in Switzerland. She’s visited by Ehrenreich’s Edward Ridgeway, a publishing house underling and fan of her work eager to make an impression on his bosses by convincing her to write one more Tom Ripley book. He’s even bribed her with gifts from the States: A package of her favorite Brooks Brothers shirts, Cambpell’s Soup, and a fancy knife.
Will that knife end up embedded in someone by the end of the film? C’mon, what do you think?
Highsmith is understandably not thrilled about being coerced into writing another Ripley, but what the hell, Ridgeway’s come all the way here, so why not have some fun? Highsmith sets him a challenge: Convince her there’s a decent Ripley plot waiting to be written, and she’ll sign his contract. The rest of the movie splits between Ridgeway and Highsmith’s interactions, Ridgeway’s own adventures in town and the developing plot of their story, in which Ridgeway imagines himself as a Ripleyesque character courting an heiress (Olivia Cooke) so he can bump off her rich relatives.
The initial back-and-forth between Ehrenreich and Mirren is plenty of fun, with her Highsmith holding him off at every turn and his Ridgeway showing a surprising depth of knowledge of her work for someone who seems so unassuming. We also explore Highsmith’s house, stylishly decorated with intimidating weapon displays and aquariums full of snails (a nod to her novel Deep Water). Signs also point to the publishing rep who visited before Ridgeway, a guy who mysteriously vanished after his interaction with Highsmith, but whose initials are carved into the guest bed headboard.
Fun, too, is the imagined plot Highsmith and Ridgeway cook up, with Ridgeway casting himself and others he’s met in the story’s roles, giving us a deeper look at what this guy is like beyond the initial impression we’ve gotten. Those impressions complicate his interactions outside Highsmith’s house with a young woman (Cooke, again) he met on a train into town.
The subtle shifts between Ehrenreich’s appearance as Ridgeway and the suave con man he clearly wishes he could be more like raise interesting questions about the dark desires that lurk within us all. However, the twists and turns that follow are fairly unsurprising even to the most casual consumer of Highsmith’s work, proving that only Highsmith herself could pull off a truly satisfying creepy surprise.
Still, A Talent for Murder remains a clever homage to a beloved writer and the body of work she left behind. If nothing else, it’s a darkly pleasing diversion powered by an excellent cat-and-mouse relationship that will likely leave you wanting to seek out Highsmith’s work for yourself.
