Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich Star in Patricia Highsmith Thriller A Talent for Murder
The pandemic sparked a wave of contained chamber-piece thrillers—films where a handful of characters gather in remote settings and dialogue drives the tension. While titles like Kevin Williamson’s Sick stood out and Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie disappointed, few matched the ingenuity of pre-pandemic classics such as Sleuth and Deathtrap. Both were stage adaptations starring Michael Caine, built on twisty, talky plots indebted to Agatha Christie’s legacy. A Talent for Murder, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, attempts to revive that high-wire formula with a fictionalized Patricia Highsmith at its center.
A Highsmith Homage Built on Performance
Helen Mirren plays the notoriously cantankerous, bigoted author in 1995, drinking herself toward death in a remote Swiss chalet surrounded by snails and a barely seen cat. Alden Ehrenreich is Edward, an ambitious New York editor dispatched to coax her into writing another Tom Ripley novel. Highsmith refuses to become a “hooker for hire” for an “underling,” but eventually proposes a test: if Edward can help her plot a worthy murder, she’ll resurrect Ripley.
The script, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her own play, then splits into three strands. Ehrenreich’s character invents a sleek American preying on a wealthy heiress (Olivia Cooke) in Rome—a fantasy sparked by a woman he met on the train—while simultaneously pursuing the real woman. This structure makes Ehrenreich the true lead, with Mirren off-screen for long stretches.
Sharp Performances, Uneven Writing
Mirren delivers a hoot of a performance, relishing a rare substantial challenge. Ehrenreich continues his post-Star Wars pivot into darker, more complex roles—following turns in Fair Play, Weapons, and the stage play Becky Shaw—showcasing a charm that curdles into something unknowable and unsettling. He reads like a natural audition for the inevitable Ripley reboot.
Yet the writing rarely matches the actors’ caliber. Highsmith’s worldview is hateful but expressed in broadly obvious lines: “Happiness is overrated,” she says like an emo teen. The film softens her vilest views, and the invented murder plot feels too generic to bear Highsmith’s name. The meta-narrative blurs fact and fiction, but without enough back-and-forth to make the creative process compelling.
Direction and Atmosphere
Director Anton Corbijn, returning to narrative features after 2015’s Life, captures the glossy allure of the fake Ripley sequences in Italy but struggles to animate Highsmith’s Swiss home. Despite memorabilia and an armoury of weapons, the location remains stagey and atmosphere-free—a contrast to the meticulous interior work in recent chamber pieces like Olivia Wilde’s The Invite.
Twists That Tug, Not Pull
The film leads viewers down a road of reversals, but the rug is never truly pulled—only gently tugged. Knives are plunged, drinks spiked, and guns fired, yet A Talent for Murder lacks real blood. Mirren and Ehrenreich form a formidably talented duo, but they aren’t given anything truly vicious to work with.
A Talent for Murder opens in U.S. cinemas on October 23, in the U.K. on November 20, and in Australia on December 26.
