A Talent for Murder Review: Corbijn's Highsmith Drama

Edward Ridgeway (Ehrenreich) is a young New York editor with a problem: he has promised his publisher one final Tom Ripley novel from Patricia Highsmith (Mirren), who has long since retired to a quiet Swiss village and has no intention of writing another word. So he travels to Switzerland to persuade her. What begins as a professional pilgrimage - part fan letter, part negotiation - gradually curdles. The longer Edward stays, the more he wants, and the more the line between admirer and predator blurs. Around them orbit a small cast of locals and expatriates: Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), a sharp-eyed young woman with her own designs; her father Douglas (James Faulkner); the watchful Peggy (Juliet Stevenson); and Highsmith's longtime companion Kathryn Grierson (Brid Brennan). The title, of course, is a wink. The question the film poses is whether Edward has a talent for murder, or whether he's simply a man who has read too many of Highsmith's books and mistaken himself for one of her characters.

Corbijn shoots Switzerland the way Highsmith might have described it: immaculate, cold, faintly hostile. The lakes gleam, the chalets are too tidy, and the silences between characters stretch just long enough to feel like a threat. It's a seductive surface, and the director knows exactly how to make a drawing room feel like a trap. The film's best stretches are its quietest - Edward and Patricia circling each other over tea, each convinced they're the one holding the upper hand.

Mirren is the obvious draw, and she doesn't disappoint. Her Highsmith is vain, brittle, cruel in small doses, and genuinely magnetic; she plays the writer as someone who has spent a lifetime studying people for parts and now finds Edward a fascinating specimen. Ehrenreich matches her with a performance of escalating desperation - his smile never quite reaches his eyes, and the film wisely lets us watch him decide, again and again, to go one step further. Cooke makes the most of a thin role, and Stevenson and Brennan lend the supporting cast a lived-in gravity.

Where the film falters is in the middle act, which mistakes drift for dread. The premise promises a psychological duel, but the screenplay - working from Highsmith's own unfinished material and the real-life episode that inspired it - keeps deferring the confrontation. Edward's sinister turn is telegraphed early and then drawn out so languidly that when it arrives, it feels less like a revelation than a formality. The film is 106 minutes, and it plays like a 130-minute movie that lost its nerve. There's also a nagging sense that the movie is more in love with the idea of Highsmith than with the thorny, difficult woman herself; it approaches her with tweezers when it might have grabbed her by the collar.

Still, there's real pleasure in the craft. The production design is gorgeous, the score is appropriately spare, and Corbijn's eye for composition remains a genuine asset. It's a film made by adults, for adults, about the seduction of stories and the danger of wanting to live inside one. That it doesn't fully land is a disappointment, not a disaster.

Pros

• Helen Mirren's sharp, vanity-tinged Highsmith is worth the price of admission alone.
• Alden Ehrenreich's slow unraveling is expertly calibrated and genuinely unsettling.
• Corbijn's chilly, immaculate Swiss atmosphere creates constant low-grade unease.
• Strong supporting turns from Cooke, Stevenson, and Brennan.
• A literate, adult script that respects its audience's intelligence.

Cons

• The middle act sags; the promised psychological duel keeps getting postponed.
• Edward's sinister turn is telegraphed far too early to surprise.
• The film keeps Highsmith at arm's length, more icon than woman.
• A supporting cast this good deserves more screen time than the script allows.

A Talent for Murder is a film of elegant surfaces and frustrated promise - a literary thriller that quotes Highsmith without quite channeling her. Mirren and Ehrenreich make the central duel compelling enough to carry you through the slow stretches, and Corbijn's craftsmanship ensures it's never less than watchable. But the film's title suggests a nastier, more daring movie than the one we get. It's a talent for murder, all right; it just never quite commits the crime. A solid 6/10 - respectable, refined, and a little too well-behaved.