‘A Talent for Murder’: Patricia Highsmith deserved something nastier

Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich in a scene from 'A Talent for Murder'. ©Filmnation DCM

Adapted from the stage play Switzerland, Anton Corbijn’s film A Talent For Murder turns Patricia Highsmith into a character in her own fiction. It is an affectionate, but too gentle a tribute to a writer whose work was rarely known for its affection.

Patricia Highsmith’s permanent resting place in Cimitero di Tegna, a small municipal cemetery in canton Ticino, does not call attention to itself. The American novelist – the author, most famously, of the “Ripliad” series, five psychological thrillers set in Europe centered on the slippery character of Tom Ripley – is discreetly interned in a bare marble columbarium. Visitors have chosen stones over flowers to pay their respects.  

A Talent For Murder, which premiered recently at the 51st Toronto International Film Festival and one of the highlights of Zurich Film Festival in September, casts Helen Mirren as the fractious writer shortly before her death, opposite Alden Ehrenreich as Edward Ridgeway, a young American editor sent to Switzerland to extract one final instalment in the Tom Ripley series.  

Patricia Highsmith in her house in Tegna, canton Ticino, in 1998. Highsmith spent the last 14 years of her life (1981-1995) in Switzerland. © Rene Burri/magnum Photos

Adapted from Australian screenwriter Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland, the script takes no small amount of pleasure in the games of submission and domination between the domineering Highsmith and the anxious Ridgeway, who might have arrived a few months later and simply left a rock. 

“Perhaps you saw my email…” Ridgeway says to Highsmith, who, in 1995, we’re told, communicated almost exclusively via the Swiss postal service. It is a typical kind of interaction between an eager arts worker and an older artist who has seen it all. Attempts to bridge such divides are central to A Talent For Murder.  

Murray-Smith’s play has been transposed from page to stage to screen, and, paying a modern kind of homage to Highsmith’s Ripley, A Talent For Murdercourts questions of imitation versus transformation at every opportunity. As Edward Ridgeway learns, the line between imposter syndrome and fake-it-till-you-make-it is razor thin.

Interview with a vampire 

Director Anton Corbijn steps into a long and illustrious line of Highsmith cinema. Purple Noon (1960), The American Friend (1977), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) are three standout adaptations of the Ripliad, while Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951, screenplay by Highsmith) and Carol (2015, based on a semi-autobiographical Highsmith novel, The Price of Salt) highlight the remarkable range of her work. Corbijn is no Hitchcock, but with A Talent for Murder he ambitiously reaches towards territory occupied by filmmakers such as René Clair or Anthony Minghella, even if he falls short.

After an awkward prologue on board a Swiss train, A Talent for Murder begins not with Highsmith, but rather an extended riff on Dracula (1897). Ridgeway takes the part of the young, naive North American arriving to sign a contract with the mysterious European in a remote location.  

The film displays a curious commitment to this interlude, even having Ridgeway awaken with marks on his neck, with Highsmith-as-Nosferatu emerging as the obvious suspect. Although the extended allusion is swiftly abandoned, it immediately signals the film’s ambition – if not always its ability – to weave elements of pastiche into its storytelling.  

After failing to shake off the indefatigable Ridgeway, Highsmith makes him an offer: if he can help her devise a suitably Highsmithian murder plot, she will sign on the dotted line. What follows is a film within the film, with Ehrenreich, stripped of his spectacles in Ridgeway’s imagination, recast as a Ripley stand-in ready to seduce the young heiress Clementine Balfour and murder the older relatives standing between him and her inheritance. Fiction, reality and fantasy soon begin to blur, intertwining throughout the film’s brisk 104-minute running time.

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) in a restaurant in Locarno during the film festival in 1988. sda-ats

Vertigo, Cluedo, velcro

If viewers cannot help but compare Ehrenreich with his Ripley predecessors, or Corbijn’s postcard-perfect Ticino with the seedy sensuality of Mongibello, the fictional seaside village in Highsmith’s thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley, the film is extremely eager to work these gaps into its text. It needles the audience’s familiarity with earlier Ripley films while wringing what suspense it can from a familiar set of tropes. 

When Ridgeway-as-Ripley must pass as an Ivy League man at a Balfour party, for instance, it is impossible not to watch Ehrenreich straining to fill the shoes of Matt Damon or Alain Delon. The result is a curious dual-layered tension that produces a distinctly postmodern vertigo. Such pleasures, however, cannot unfortunately substitute for genuine suspense.

>> The first Ripley adaptation (1960) was French, directed by René Clément and starring a young Alain Delon. Highsmith hated the moralist tweak in the end of the film. In her works, crime usually pays off.

Corbijn attempts to shift the postcard-sunny vision of Ticino into a darker register whenever the narrative slips into the film within the film. Yet even a violent seduction scene never quite escapes the feel of a game of Cluedo. The brisk match cuts that should keep tension taut too often resemble Velcro fastenings, lacking the precision they require. At the script level, a limp succession of twists fails to distract from an ending that is visible almost from the outset. 

Ehrenreich must flick a switch between the film’s two narratives, while Mirren remains free to inhabit cantankerous grande dame mode throughout. Less generously, one might suspect that her abundance of audience-pleasing one-liners is among the chief reasons A Talent To Murder exists at all. “You’re a homo,” she taunts Ridgeway at one point, before the famously promiscuous lesbian adds, “I should know”, with an almost conspiratorial wink towards the audience.

>> The most recent (2024) filmic adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley is a Netflix production starring Andrew Scott:

Never meet your heroes 

The film nevertheless blunts Highsmith’s sharpest edges in order to preserve its portrait of a difficult but brilliant artist. A throwaway remark about leaving New York to escape “the Blacks and the Jews” seems an obligatory nod to many prejudices that once led Highsmith to refer to the Holocaust the “semicaust.”  

All the same, A Talent For Murder’s multi-layered exploration of imitation proves more fertile ground for reflection than for suspense, or for an honest characterisation of its main subject.

Director Anton Corbijn and partner at Zurich Film Festival’s Green carpet on September 30, 2026. 2026 Getty Images

Acting and adaptation emerge as merely two more of Ripley’s games, where the difference between success and failure is little more than confidence. Somewhat awkwardly, and in one of the film’s best jokes, the same appears true of seduction and artistic ambition, as Mirren purrs in the ear of an unsettled Ehrenreich.

History is full of such missed encounters between generations. The renowned New York painter Duncan Hannah once recalled his excitement at meeting Lou Reed as a young man, only for the Velvet Underground singer to introduce himself by asking whether the artist would return to his hotel room and defecate in his mouth. 

A Talent For Murder is nowhere near that nasty, which is unfortunate when dealing with a character as offensive as Highsmith. Faced with a difficult legacy, it would be unkind to say the film merely places a stone upon the author’s grave. It is, however, extremely careful not to disturb the dead.

Edited by Catherine Hickley and Eduardo Simantob/sb