Patricia Highsmith is an unusually difficult person to threaten with a Highsmith plot. She is likely to notice the flattering resemblance long before anyone notices what the visitor is doing. A Talent for Murder builds a good deal of pleasure from that difficulty. Alden Ehrenreich’s Edward Ridgeway arrives at the writer’s home in Switzerland with a request for another Tom Ripley novel. Helen Mirren lets Highsmith assess him as though a request from a publisher were a minor form of trespass. He has brought the proposition into her house. She can decide how long he has to stand there holding it.
Anton Corbijn gets useful dramatic mileage from the way the Swiss setting gives the encounters a frame. The space available to Highsmith makes her ability to exclude people seem almost like a physical property. Edward needs her to keep inviting him into it. Mirren can turn a conversational delay into an assertion of ownership. Ehrenreich is most useful when he treats her hostility as an answer he can learn from. The game stays interesting while an apparently polite young man can be improving his position by accepting treatment that would send someone with a simpler purpose back to the door.
The request for a final Ripley book has the right degree of professional plausibility. A publisher might genuinely see an unfinished commercial opportunity where a writer sees only something she has grown tired of doing. Edward can make the work of his visit sound entirely straightforward, which is an advantage in the presence of someone with reason to suspect a more flattering purpose. Mirren has some of her best opportunities when Highsmith can be contemptuous of the proposal and show a continuing interest in the skill with which he makes it. The intrigue depends on giving both reactions a place.
Joanna Murray-Smith adapts her own play, Switzerland, and the origin shows in the way the film lets a relationship turn on who can name what the two are doing. Corbijn has a good eye for the isolation of a figure inside a severe, handsome interior. The harder work is to make the images carry information that the exchanges will leave unspoken. There are stretches where the film’s reserve creates a convincing pocket of privacy. There are also stretches where it merely gives the next clever line a clean background.
Olivia Cooke’s Clementine opens another line of attention. She gives the film access to someone with a different investment in Edward and in the parts he has learned to play. The additional perspective is useful because the central pair can become so absorbed in recognizing their own fictional reference points. It is also a test of whether the film can see further into its characters than the invitation to spot likenesses to Ripley. Cooke is most valuable when her presence changes the stakes of an encounter for reasons that belong to Clementine herself.
The surroundings sometimes suggest a lonelier film about a writer becoming dependent on the attention she has spent a long time arranging to avoid. A stranger who knows her books by heart has a way of getting through the defenses even if he has yet to demonstrate an intimate understanding of her. That distinction between knowing the work and knowing its maker could cause real hurt on either side. The thriller’s habit of treating knowledge as an advantage in a game leaves less room for that unpleasant possibility than Corbijn’s more isolated images appear to invite.
The risk in approaching Highsmith as a character from her own fiction is that her inventiveness becomes a set of clues to be solved. The more rewarding possibility lies in having a writer and a stranger take turns discovering what they are willing to believe about one another. Mirren understands the degree of vanity that can coexist with a good instinct for danger. The role has teeth when a woman with ample reasons to shut a conversation down keeps going because she wants to hear how the young man will phrase the next part. The film can be less dangerous than she is, especially once the story has to explain what sort of game it has been playing.
