Mirren Plays Highsmith in 'A Talent for Murder' — SkimNews
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- 'A Talent for Murder' is directed by Anton Corbijn and adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her play 'Switzerland,' with Mirren as a vicious, hard-drinking Patricia Highsmith and Alden Ehrenreich as Edward Ridgway, a bespectacled publishing agent who visits her Swiss chalet in 1995 to press her for a sixth Ripley novel.
- The film's structure splinters into multiple narratives, including Rome-set interludes where Ehrenreich doubles as Ripley's duplicitous antihero, with DP Robbie Ryan marking fantasy and reality through shifts from cold Alpine light to warmer noir darkness.
- Mirren's performance as a racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic Highsmith who demands Brooks Brothers shirts, Campbell's soup, and a French hunting dagger is singled out as the film's chief pleasure, alongside Dimitri Capuani's stuffy, nicotine-stained production design and Dickon Hinchliffe's ominous string score.
- The review's verdict: the 105-minute film's 'tricky, sexy buildup' outpaces its payoff, and its conceptually busy strands 'never knot together in quite the complex, devious way that a Highsmith homage really should.'
- The film premiered at the Toronto festival and will be released in U.S. theaters by Bleecker Street on Oct. 23, positioned by the reviewer as 'an upscale adult diversion palpably imbued with the chill of early fall.'
Why it matters: For Bleecker Street, 'A Talent for Murder' is a prestige adult-skewing counterprogrammer for the Oct. 23 corridor, anchored by Mirren's awards-season-friendly turn as Highsmith — a role that gives the distributor a literary-cinema hook after the film's Toronto gala, even if the review signals the meta-noir concept outruns its 105-minute execution.
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