Producers: Gabrielle Tana, Mickey Liddell, Pete Shilaimon, Jim Robison, Kurt Martin, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Troy Lum, Andrea Occhipinti and Stefano Massenzi   Director: Anton Corbijn   Screenplay: Joanna Murray-Smith   Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, Brid Brennan and James Faulkner   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

Although they generate a good deal of tension, Patricia Highsmith’s stories are less mysteries than character studies, and the author, who died in 1995, was certainly a character herself, a fiercely misanthropic lesbian with a pronounced racist streak.  She was also a brilliant crafter of tales of deception and unease whose prose resonated with icy precision.

In “A Talent for Murder,” adapted for the screen by Joanna Murray-Smith from her two-character 2014 play “Switzerland,” Highsmith is played to brutal perfection by Helen Mirren, made up by costumer Gabriella Pescucci to look like quite a close approximation of the original.  She’s also a hard-drinking heavy smoker who’s definitely unwell (she’d die later in the year in which the story’s set).

The conceit is that she’s being dunned by her American publisher to write a sixth installment of her so-called Ripliad, crime novels detailing the career of charming but murderous Tom Ripley, the sociopathic antihero she introduced in 1955’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and continued to follow through four additional books, the last appearing in 1991.  The first representative they’ve sent to her Swiss home to persuade her has disappeared (though the film suggests that he escaped her house in disarray and was later in custody at the airport). 

So the publisher sends a second employee, young Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) to cajole Highsmith to sign a contract.  She’s hardly welcoming, initially insisting that he leave immediately but, once he shows his intimate knowledge of her work (and presents her with a variety of gifts, including a magnificent knife she adds to her prized collection of weapons), permits him to stay the night.  He finds the initials of his predecessor carved onto the bed in the guest room, and awakens to find a cut on his neck, perhaps left by a knife.

Highsmith explains that she’s suffering from writer’s block, and while both insulting Ridgeway and taking pleasure in discomfiting him, invites him to collaborate in fashioning what amounts to a new Ripley story.  In Murray-Smith’s opening up of the play, he assumes the role of a Ripleyesque character who sets his sights on Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), an American tourist in Rome modeled on a young woman of that name Edward had met on the train.  This “Ripley” learns of the fortune Clementine would inherit if her uncle Douglas (James Faulkner) and Aunt Peggy (Juliet Stevenson) were removed, and acts accordingly while cunningly romancing her. 

Simultaneously Edward becomes involved with the real Clementine, who’s also having to wait for an inheritance.  A conflation of the fictional, cultivated Ripley and the real, social-climbing Ridgeway occurs, reaching an apogee when Highsmith prods Edward to come clean about how he became an orphan.  By the time that Edward meets Clementine again on the train back to the States, one wonders whether he isn’t planning a very Ripley solution to both their problems.

Edward’s story also introduces a wonderfully Highsmith-like character in Kathryn Grierson (Brid Brennan), Peggy’s best friend, who’s accomplished the rise from poverty to high society herself and brittlely advises Ridgeway on how to improve his game to succeed at the same ambition.  Their brief conversation is as finely honed as the longer ones between Edward and Highsmith. 

Toward the close, it must be said, “A Talent for Murder” goes too far in its search to surprise; a scene involving Highsmith, Ridgeway and that spectacular knife comes out of left field, and pretty much falls flat.  But for the most part its mordant take on the cat-and-mouse formula Anthony Shaffer used in “Sleuth” works fairly well, especially as the fusion of Ridgeway and Ripley becomes evident: the question turns on who is the cat, and who the mouse.

Highsmith devotees will probably be divided in their reactions to the film; some will appreciate it as a deft homage to the author, while others will consider it a deficient effort to replicate her literary voice.  One can be fairly certain that she would have hated it; she despised almost all the adaptations of her stories, of which there were many, and one would expect no less disdain over such a portrait of herself, however cleverly fashioned.    

What’s undeniable is the skill of the stars.   Mirren brings delicious venom to Highsmith, the malicious delight in her eyes as she tosses a slight smile at her intended victim making us complicit in her game.  Ehrenreich is the real surprise here, matching Mirren beat for beat in what’s in some ways the more difficult role, since he’s actually playing two people, and capturing the complexities of both of them.  (Coming shortly after he received stellar notices, and a Tony, for his performance in the Broadway revival of “Becky Shaw” makes 2026 a banner year for him.) Cooke’s elegant naïveté fits both Clementines to perfection, and among those in support Brennan is a model of chilly calculation.  All benefit from the expertise of director Anton Corbijn, whose work here reflects the excellence of “A Most Wanted Man” rather than the pretentiousness of “The American.”

The film is also a good-looking one, with Dimitri Capuani’s production design especially effective in its approximation of the interior of the Highsmith home and Robbie Ryan’s cinematography capturing it, and the exteriors with which Murray-Smith and Corbijn have opened up the play, in finely-judged visuals.  Andrew Hulme’s supple editing keeps the shifts from “fact” to “fiction” smooth, while Dickon Hinchliffe contributes a score that adds winking notes to genre conventionality.

“A Talent for Murder” works precisely because it has fun both mimicking and toying with Highsmith’s peculiar literary approach and playing on the grotesqueries of her psyche, shaped, as the script explains, by a terrible relationship with her mother but taken to horrendous extremes by the woman herself for reasons professional as well as personal.  The result is an engaging divertissement that will appeal especially to Highsmith aficionados but should provide pleasure beyond her circle of admirers.