TL;DR: Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich spark nicely, and the film looks gorgeous, but its story-within-a-story gimmick quietly smothers the suspense. A stylish, talky Ripley-adjacent thriller that’s pleasant company yet rarely dangerous.
Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder has one of the most deliciously nerdy premises of the year. A junior employee at a New York literary agency, Edward Ridgeway, is sent to Switzerland with a single job: get Patricia Highsmith to sign on for one more Tom Ripley novel, or start updating his résumé. Highsmith, played here as a fictionalized version of the real author, wants nothing more to do with the charming sociopath who paid her bills for decades. There’s also the small matter that the last agency employee sent on this errand may not have made it home. That’s a terrific setup for anyone who has ever devoured a crime paperback and wondered what kind of mind dreams up a character like Ripley.
The script comes from Joanna Murray-Smith, adapting her own stage play Switzerland, and you can feel those theatrical roots in almost every frame. Most of the movie takes place inside Highsmith’s isolated house, with two people circling each other across tables, drinks and manuscripts. That’s not a problem on its own, because some of the best thrillers ever made are just people talking in rooms. The question with any chamber piece is whether the conversation builds pressure, and that’s where this film starts to wobble.
Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich make the sparring worth watching
Helen Mirren is clearly having a blast playing Highsmith as a prickly, controlling presence who treats every visitor like an uninvited houseguest and possibly a future plot device. She doesn’t soften the author into a cuddly eccentric, which is the right call, because the whole movie depends on us believing she might be dangerous. Alden Ehrenreich matches her well as Edward, who arrives looking like the most harmless person in Switzerland and slowly suggests there’s more ambition under the polite smile. Their chemistry is adversarial in the fun way, like watching two chess players who both suspect the other is cheating. When the film lets them simply spar, it hums.
Ehrenreich also gets the trickiest assignment in the cast, playing both Edward and the Ripley-style character he and Highsmith invent together. As the film progresses, those two roles start to blur, and he handles that overlap with real control rather than mugging for the camera. It’s a quietly impressive performance that rewards attention. Olivia Cooke appears as Clementine Balfour, a woman Edward meets on the train into Switzerland who gets folded into the imaginary novel as its wealthy target. Cooke is reliable as ever, but the character is thinly sketched, and the film never gives her much to do beyond being the shiny object in someone else’s scheme.
The story-within-a-story gimmick is where the tension leaks out
Here’s my big issue with this A Talent for Murder review in a nutshell. Once Edward convinces Highsmith to brainstorm a new Ripley adventure with him, a huge chunk of the runtime becomes a dramatization of that hypothetical book. On paper, it’s clever: the fictional plot mirrors the real one, with a young man charming his way toward someone else’s money. In practice, it splits the movie into two halves that keep undercutting each other. The invented story can’t generate real stakes because we know it’s a pitch being workshopped, and the framing story stalls because its two leads are mostly sitting still while we watch their imagination play out.
It reminded me of the difference between playing a great boss fight and watching someone describe one to you over coffee. Every elegant murder or narrow escape in the novel-within-the-film lands with a soft thud, because it only exists as a draft that could be rewritten the moment Highsmith gets bored. Meta storytelling can absolutely work, and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation turned a writer’s process into something genuinely unhinged and surprising. A Talent for Murder never commits to that level of chaos, and it doesn’t build toward the kind of jaw-dropping reversal that would make all the layering feel earned.
Gorgeous craft wrapped around a missing jolt
On a purely visual level, this is a lovely film to sit in front of. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, best known for his work with Yorgos Lanthimos, shoots the Swiss locations with rich colour and texture, and the costumes and production design are polished to a high shine. Every room looks like a place where secrets get kept and cocktails get poured. That handsome finish suits Highsmith’s world, which has always been about elegant surfaces hiding rot underneath. The problem is that the rot never fully seeps through.
Corbijn has always been an expert at mood, and he wrings plenty of atmosphere out of the setting. What the film lacks is momentum. Stage material often relies on rhythm, live tension and the electricity of actors sharing physical space, and that energy doesn’t automatically survive the trip to the big screen. Because Murray-Smith adapted her own play, the film seems reluctant to rebuild the structure for cinema, and the result feels a bit too comfortable for a story with “murder” in its title. It’s a stylish ride that keeps hinting at a sharp turn it never quite takes.
Verdict
A Talent for Murder works best as a performance showcase and a handsome slice of literary mischief. Mirren and Ehrenreich give it real bite, Robbie Ryan’s photography makes Switzerland look like the world’s most expensive crime scene, and the premise is catnip for Highsmith fans and anyone who loves stories about writers. The metafictional structure, however, drains the suspense from both of its storylines, and the absence of a genuine knockout twist leaves the thriller side feeling underpowered. Olivia Cooke also deserves a better-written role. If you enjoy talky chamber dramas, Ripley lore or simply watching Helen Mirren terrify a young man over drinks, it’s worth a cinema trip. If you want a white-knuckle mystery, wait for streaming.
