About 30 minutes into “A Talent for Murder,” Helen Mirren, playing the reclusive and curmudgeonly author Patricia Highsmith, gives a little lecture on murder techniques to a young editor.
“I like guns all right, and knives, obviously,” Highsmith says. “But variety is the spice of life — and death. What about stranglings or drownings? Obviously poison.” She laughs. “So playful!”
The camera moves slowly down to a plate of scrambled eggs before the editor, as Highsmith continues to muse. “Arsenic, unoriginal but iconic. Of course the really great thing about it is that it has no color. And no smell. And no taste.” She smiles at him challengingly.
“A Talent for Murder,” which opens Friday, is set in 1995, toward the end of Highsmith’s life. Ill, alcoholic and misanthropic (to put it mildly), the author — whom Mirren plays with a vanity-free faithfulness to Highsmith’s unflattering blunt-cut hair and chain-smoker’s lined, pasty skin — is holed up at her home in the Swiss Alps, staring at a blank page in her typewriter and drinking steadily.
The editor, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), sent by Highsmith’s American publishing house, is the second to be tasked with trying to persuade her to write a final novel starring the charming, murderous psychopath Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s famous fictional creation in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955) and four subsequent novels.
The publisher’s first emissary has mysteriously disappeared, but Ridgeway — initially brutally rejected by Highsmith — eventually goads her into starting a new story. Together, they begin to concoct a Ripley mystery, into which Ridgeway weaves a young woman, Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), whom he met on the train journey to the mountains.
The film, directed by Anton Corbijn and written by Joanna Murray-Smith, based on her 2014 play, “Switzerland,” has been winning over reviewers with Alissa Wilkinson of The Times making it a critic’s pick and calling it “deliciously dark.” Highsmith’s novels, and the Ripley ones in particular, have long been catnip for filmmakers, and “A Talent for Murder” is part of the latest mini-vogue for the author, in the works at around the same time as Netflix ran the “Ripley” mini-series, starring Andrew Scott.
“I really like psychological thrillers, and I like all the films of the Highsmith stories,” said Corbijn (“Control,” “A Most Wanted Man”), who is also well known as a photographer and music video director.
He had been looking for a film project, he said, when the London producer Gabrielle Tana brought him the script for “A Talent for Murder.”
“This idea of making a pretend Highsmith story really appealed because it gives you a lot more freedom,” he said in a video interview from Amsterdam, where he lives.
Tana worked with Murray-Smith on opening the story “into the luxurious, glamorous world of Ripley,” and so making it feel more cinematic, she said. The story within a story that Highsmith and Ridgeway create is now set in Rome, where the Ripley-esque protagonist (Highsmith’s estate didn’t want the name to be used) sets his sights on Clementine, heir to a family fortune. There are just a few family members to dispose of first.
“The whole ignition for the play was the complicated genius of Patricia Highsmith,” Murray-Smith said in a telephone interview from Melbourne. “Her politics are horrendous. She is homophobic despite being gay, antisemitic, anti-everything. Yet she is one of the most psychologically astute writers of the 20th century, particularly brilliant at allowing us into the dark parts of the human psyche.”
In a video call, Mirren said she had been drawn to the role because, reading the script, “you had absolutely no idea of where it was going, where it was situated. Was it in her imagination?”
She added that she often found roles based on real-life figures more interesting to play. “Somehow fictional characters never have the absurdity and eccentricity and surrealism of real-life characters,” she said. Researching Highsmith, she added, “I got a sense of a profoundly passionate, angry, disappointed, clever person.”
Mirren doesn’t shy away from showing a woman aged by illness and bitterness, incorporating the slightly hunched shoulders (“like a toad waiting to jump”) and suspicious narrowed eyes she noticed in photographs of Highsmith. “It was definitely a ‘let go of any vanity’ moment,” she said. “Which in a way was very freeing, and very Patricia Highsmith.”
The author’s sniping, combative exchanges with Ridgeway, and their growing, unspoken intimacy as they develop the story, sees Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story,” “Oppenheimer”) mutate into the fictional Ripley figure in pursuit of Clementine and her fortune. As he grows in confidence, it becomes less and less clear whether Ridgeway always had the cold heart of the schemer he begins to incarnate — and what Highsmith’s grasp of him is.
“For me, a lot of what happens in the film is that the Highsmith character forces Edward to connect with a part of himself he hasn’t felt safe enough to let out,” Ehrenreich said in a video interview. “He has buried away his edge, and she pushes him to connect with that.” He added that the relationship with Clementine “is the arena in which Edward plays out what he has learned by going through the gauntlet with Highsmith.”
Part of the appeal of the role, he said, was playing two characters: Edward and the fictional Ripley figure.
“Where it gets murkier is towards the end of the film,” he said. “The fun of it is that everyone walks away with a slightly different take on what is happening.”
The Rome sections of the story-within-a-story offer painterly shadows and glamorous, gorgeous interiors (by the production designer Dimitri Capuani), but the Swiss scenes offer a tense, claustrophobic reality, with Hitchcockian jump scares and ominous music.
Corbijn said that while his early films had been “very much led by my photographic eye, now I tried to tell the story more.”
Inspired by Hitchcock’s use of small spaces to create suspense, Corbijn asked the cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, to “use a lot of low angles, looking up, to keep the tension in there.” He added, “But tension with a comical element. I didn’t want it to become a caricature.”
Mirren, he said, “gave it just the right swing. She is very dislikable at moments, but she is funny, and I think in the end you root for her.”
Playing Highsmith was “an intense experience,” Mirren said. “I had great sympathy for the real Patricia Highsmith, her honesty, her humanity, her intelligence.” She added that Highsmith was dreadful and awful but had been driven by a great anger at not being recognized in the same way as male writers. “She was a wonderfully complex personality,” Mirren said.
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