‘A Talent for Murder’ Review: Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was known to have a nasty personality: misanthropic, racist and anti-Semitic. She was even better known as a brilliant crime novelist, able to delve into the minds of murderers. Does it take a killer to know a killer? That is one of the tantalizing questions bubbling up in A Talent for Murder, in which Helen Mirren embodies Highsmith in all her devious, scowling genius.

Although the film is true to Highsmith’s character, the story is entirely made up. Alden Ehrenreich plays the invented Edward Ridgeway, a young representative from Highsmith’s New York publisher, sent to persuade her to write a sixth novel about Tom Ripley. In reality, she wrote five, with The Talented Mr. Ripley her most acclaimed. Playing off her Ripley character, A Talent for Murder spins out into two other storylines as it becomes a cat-and-mouse game — or maybe a cat-and-cat game — between Highsmith and the guest she has reluctantly allowed into her home.

With a screenplay smartly expanded by Joanna Murray-Smith from her two-person play, Switzerland, this psychological thriller is tautly directed by Anton Corbijn (A Most Wanted Man) at his stylish best. It looks sumptuous and proceeds at an absorbing slow-burn pace as it reveals itself to be about doppelgangers and identity, the line between fiction and reality, and whether deep down we all have the capacity for murder.

Ridgeway arrives in Switzerland, where Highsmith has lived in isolation just outside Zurich for years. It is 1995, in reality the year she died at 74. He knows that she is rumored to have poisoned a neighbor’s noisy dog and that the publisher’s previous emissary has mysteriously dropped out of sight. Traveling by train, he sits across from a young woman named Clementine (Olivia Cooke, always natural on screen). He is reading The Talented Mr. Ripley and, in a meta touch, mentions that Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train became the Hitchcock film. She drops the information that she is an orphan visiting a rich aunt. As in any Highsmith novel, some details are more relevant than they might seem.

Mirren, of course, is a master. She deftly makes Highsmith a piece of work — smoking, drinking, steely-eyed as she snarls at Edward, threatening to throw him out, telling him she left New York to avoid “the Jews and the Blacks and the Puerto Ricans.” (The line acknowledges Highsmith’s most despicable traits, but is the film’s only reference to them.) All the while, Mirren subtly lets us know that Highsmith is testing him, teasing out who this meek-looking young man is. When Edward tells her about the car accident that killed his parents when he was a boy, Ehrenreich plays him as just slippery enough to make us wonder if he is lying. It’s too neat a story.

He ingratiates himself partly by knowing Highsmith’s work inside out and also because he has brought along some items she has requested: Brooks Brothers shirts, cans of soup, a large knife to add to the collection she has nailed to the wall. Dimitri Capuani’s production design is an essential, telling element of the film, from the pill bottles on top of the fridge to the rows of poisons in the pantry that Highsmith knows Edward will spot.

Although the first stretch and Mirren’s presence might lead you to expect a character study, the film soon moves into the other storylines, interspersed with Edward’s visit to the author. As she begins to imagine a plot for a new novel, she enlists his ideas. We see that story, set in Rome, with Ehrenreich as the much-better-groomed Ripley character — performance so smooth he really could play Ripley — and Cooke as a slightly fictionalized version of Clementine. The Ripley references are blunt: In the new story, as in Highsmith’s books, he is a poseur, a fraud with a knack for cozying up to the rich to kill them and step into their luxurious lives. And while you can’t out-Highsmith Highsmith, this story-within-the-story is a clever facsimile.

That first murder in the potential novel was Highsmith’s idea and she charges Edward, who claims to be such an expert on her work, with inventing another. He leaves for the day to do that and runs into the actual Clementine, spinning out yet another plotline that eventually takes him to a party at her aunt’s grand house. In this art-filled mansion and throughout the film, Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is glorious and rich, from the crystalline sky outside Highsmith’s windows in Switzerland (actually shot in northern Italy) to the Roman scenes on city streets and in lavish sitting rooms. Juliet Stevenson elegantly plays the aunt who is, naturally, a ripe target for a Ripleyesque murder. By now Edward Ridgeway and Tom Ripley have begun to merge. Highsmith’s language is quite precise when she asks Edward, “How are you going to murder her?” the “you” conflating the editor and the fictional counterpart they are creating.

At the very start, Mirren’s voiceover describes a young man getting on a train, just as Edward does, and then the voiceover disappears entirely. Has this been Highsmith’s imagined story after all? Maybe. That possibility is dangled, but a bit underdeveloped. And in the end, the film can’t support the weight of the existential questions about murder that it raises. But this playful, sleek little homage is so entertaining that those lapses hardly matter.