A Talent for Murder Review: Mirren vs. Ripley

Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) is a young American with a mission: convince the famously reclusive Patricia Highsmith to resurrect Tom Ripley for one last book. So he packs his bags, leaves New York, and heads to Switzerland, where the aging author lives in prickly, wine-soaked exile. What starts as a polite literary pilgrimage curdles by degrees. Edward pushes, Highsmith resists, and the dance between them gets progressively darker - until who's manipulating whom becomes the whole ballgame. Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke) and a supporting cast of Swiss eccentrics hover around the edges, but this is fundamentally a two-person chess match.

Let's start with the obvious: Helen Mirren is having a blast. Highsmith - antisocial, sharp-tongued, gloriously unimpressed by her visitor - is a role built for a performer with a surplus of wit and zero interest in being liked, and Mirren delivers that in spades. Every arched eyebrow and dismissive sip of wine lands. Alden Ehrenreich holds his own as the eager-to-a-fault Edward, playing the wide-eyed fanboy so convincingly that his gradual shift toward something uglier feels genuinely unsettling. The scenes where the two simply spar over the dinner table are the film's best.

Corbijn, unsurprisingly, brings the visual goods. The Swiss setting is shot with the chilly, clinical beauty of a coffee-table book - all grey skies, glassy lakes, and interiors so tidy they feel like traps. It's the perfect aesthetic for a story about obsession and confinement. The film breathes atmosphere.

But here's the rub: A Talent for Murder is too restrained for its own good. The premise promises a descent into the sinister, and the film keeps hinting at that turn without ever fully committing. There's a psychological cat-and-mouse game in here, but it's played at a whisper when the material is begging for a scream. Pacing is the other casualty - the middle stretch sags under long, elliptical conversations that circle the same point without landing it. Olivia Cooke is criminally underused; her Clementine drifts through scenes with the vague purpose of reminding us there are other people in Switzerland. Juliet Stevenson and James Faulkner make the most of their smaller turns, but none of the supporting players ever crack the film's icy surface.

Genre purists should also be warned: this is firmly in drama territory, not crime-thriller territory. You get menacing glances and loaded silences, not chases or twists. That's a legitimate choice, but with a 6/10 average from audiences, it seems plenty of viewers wanted the pulpier version.

Still, there's something seductive about the restraint. The film is less interested in shocking you than in making you uncomfortable, and on that level it works - especially in the final act, when Edward's true desperation finally floods into the room. It's a cautionary tale about fandom, about what happens when admiration curdles into entitlement, and Mirren is the perfect wall to bounce that off.

Pros

• Helen Mirren is deliciously prickly as Highsmith - worth the ticket alone
• Corbijn's cold, gorgeous Swiss framing is pure arthouse eye candy
• The Mirren - Ehrenreich sparring scenes crackle with tension
• Ehrenreich's slow transformation is subtly unnerving

Cons

• The promised sinister edge never fully arrives - it teases, then holds back
• The middle act drags with circular, overlong conversations
• Olivia Cooke's Clementine feels wasted in an underwritten role
• More literary drama than the crime-thriller the marketing suggests

A Talent for Murder is a respectable, gorgeously shot chamber piece anchored by a fantastic Mirren performance - the kind of film that plays like a thrillingly nasty dinner party and then leaves early without saying goodbye. Fans of Corbijn's moody minimalism and anyone who wants to watch Mirren verbally dismantle a young man for an hour and a half should seek it out. Everyone else can wait for streaming.