What do Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Andrew Scott, Matt Damon, John Malkovich, and now Alden Ehrenreich share in common? As of 2026, all of them have played some version of novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most well-known character, Tom Ripley. Of course, Ehrenreich isn’t really playing Ripley, is he?
A Talent for Murder (not to be confused with the Angela Lansbury telefilm A Talent for Killing) stars Ehrenreich as Edward Ridgeway, who travels to Switzerland in 1995 on behalf of his New York publishing house in order to convince Highsmith (Helen Mirren) to sign a contract for a sixth novel in her “Ripliad.” En route, he meets a young American woman named Clementine (Olivia Cooke) who is visiting her well-to-do European relatives. Aboard the train, she notices that he’s reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, while she falls asleep reading Camus. The cab driver who takes Ridgeway to Highsmith’s remote home notes that she has more local notoriety for having killed a neighbor’s annoying dog than for any of her literary accomplishments, which does nothing to assuage Ridgeway’s concerns over the fact that the last agent sent by his company called home to say he felt unsafe with Highsmith and was never heard from again. Upon arrival, Highsmith greets him with hostility, immediately declaring that she will never return to New York, tipping her hand to reveal some old school racism in the process (she explicitly names Jewish, Korean, and Black people as the reason she left). Ehrenreich nevertheless presents her with the peace offerings she previously expressed interest in: some American notebooks, six cans of Campbell soup, some shirts from Brooks Brothers, and a fancy knife, which she adds to the collection on her wall, Deathtrap style.
After getting some jollies from giving the young man a hard time, like sending him to fetch a beer from a fridge in her pantry, which is filled with various poisons, and feeding him a breakfast to which she may or may not have added arsenic, the two brainstorm a potential new adventure for Tom Ripley. This is envisioned with Ridgeway in the Ripley role, where he reimagines his first encounter with Clementine, this time casting himself as unapproachable and seductive. Using details from their discussion aboard the train, he paints the rest of Clementine’s life as background for Tom’s next project: the loving grandfather who controls the first set of purse strings, the sophisticated aunt who is the second to stand in the way of inheritance, and eventually Clementine herself, whom Tom will ultimately have to kill in order to get her money — or, rather, the beautiful art and travel that her inheritance will allow him to go on enjoying. After they plan out the killing of (fictional) Clementine’s grandfather, Highsmith issues a challenge: if Ridgeway can come up with a “sufficiently Highsmith” method of murder for the aunt, she’ll sign his contract.
Mirren is quite good as Highsmith, although this isn’t a very demanding role. For the most part, she’s cranky and irascible, without too much else required. There’s a moment early on when Ridgeway awakes in the night with an unexplained cut on his neck, and when he checks to see if Highsmith is in bed, he finds her supposedly asleep, only for her to turn on her desk lamp and cackle at him. Although the play on which the film is based is a decade old, there are moments here that make this feel like Camp Miasma for those whose hyperfixation is literature rather than slashers, as this also features a super fan (Ridgeway can recognize a passage from a lesser known work, The Heroine, in only a couple of lines) visiting a reclusive artist to convince her to take one more ride on the gravy train, only for the visitor to find themselves lost in the blurred lines between reality and fiction. Mirren gets less to play with than Gillian Anderson did in Miasma, as she spends most of her onscreen time sitting in a chair, smoking, and making cryptic statements about Ridgeway’s sexuality and comparing him to the hermaphroditic snails that she keeps as pets. She might smirk from time to time, but there’s nothing to challenge her as a performer. Much of the insight that we get into her as a character comes from her home: the remote location; a withering, nasty letter from her mother which she keeps framed in her guest room; a French literary award to which she has added “and Tom Ripley” next to her name, as she says that he is always with her, like a longtime companion. She’s oddly defensive of her character, rebutting Ridgeway when he calls Tom “evil,” as she says that every person has a killer inside.
Ehrenreich has more to do, balancing between Ripley’s suave, practiced manipulator and Ridgeway’s stammering nerdiness. He fills both roles well, with the difference between them illustrated when Ridgeway coincidentally runs into Clementine in the nearby town and is invited to a party at her real aunt’s home; he’s noticeably out of step with the elite, while Ripley immediately endears himself to the fictional avatars of Clementine’s family. They’re more alike than initially meets the eye, however, as Ridgeway’s journey, being sent to Europe from New York to retrieve someone, echoes Tom Ripley’s being sent to find Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and has to blend in with Clementine’s aunt by pretending to have gone to school with Clementine in New York, which was also Tom and Dickie’s connection. Ridgeway discovers the previous literary agent’s clothing in a closet and wears it to meet Clementine’s family, just as Ripley stole Dickie’s clothes after killing him, and the lines between fact and fiction start to blur. Is Ridgeway actually Highsmith’s creation somehow manifested in the real world, come round at last to visit his maker, or is Ridgeway simply losing his grip on reality?
I reread The Talented Mr. Ripley earlier this year, and as I write this, I’ve got a library copy of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (the Hitchcock adaptation gets a shout-out when Clementine and Ridgeway first meet) sitting about ten feet from me, waiting to be read during some upcoming travel. In the past couple of years, we’ve covered Purple Noon as a podcast episode, I watched the Andrew Scott Netflix Ripley series, and I was pretty disappointed by The American Friend. This is a movie that was virtually tailor-made for me, and perhaps that set my expectations a little too high. I have a feeling that it will only improve in the rewatch, when I’m already familiar with its overall structure and I can interact with the text directly rather than being distracted by what I was expecting. It’s a fun ride, if a little messy.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
