Helen Mirren stars in “A Talent for Murder” as Patricia Highsmith

By Marcus Bennett

Helen Mirren plays Patricia Highsmith in “A Talent for Murder,” a psychological thriller that opens Friday.

About 30 minutes into the film, Mirren’s Highsmith gives a young editor a lecture on murder techniques while a plate of scrambled eggs sits before him. “I like guns all right, and knives, obviously,” she says. “But variety is the spice of life — and death. What about stranglings or drownings? Obviously poison.”

She laughs and continues. She names arsenic as unoriginal but iconic. She stresses that it has no color, smell or taste. The camera moves slowly down to the eggs. Her smile challenges the editor.

A novelist inside her own mystery

The film sets its story in 1995, toward the end of Highsmith’s life. It places her at her home in the Swiss Alps, staring at a blank page in her typewriter and drinking steadily. Highsmith is ill, alcoholic and misanthropic.

Mirren plays Highsmith with a vanity-free faithfulness. She keeps the physical evidence of her life in view: the unflattering blunt-cut hair, the lined, pasty skin of a chain smoker and the steady drinking. The reclusive, curmudgeonly author remains central to the characterization. Her caustic personality makes the leap from author to character plausible. She does not merely observe the story of Tom Ripley. She helps to build it. Her command of murder techniques becomes part of the suspense.

The return of Tom Ripley

The editor is Edward Ridgeway, played by Alden Ehrenreich. He is the second man sent by Highsmith’s American publishing house to persuade her to write a final novel, this time around Tom Ripley, the charming, murderous psychopath at the center of her fiction.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” appeared in 1955. Four subsequent novels extended Ripley’s story, giving the film a recognizable literary framework. Ridgeway arrives to find that the publisher’s first emissary has mysteriously disappeared. Highsmith initially rejects him brutally. He goads her into starting a new story, and they begin to concoct a Ripley mystery together.

Ridgeway also introduces Clementine Balfour, played by Olivia Cooke. Ridgeway met the young woman during his train journey to the mountains and begins to weave her into the new mystery.

What does the casting change for Highsmith’s reputation?

The casting moves the film beyond literary biography and toward a psychological confrontation between Highsmith and the figure she created, with murder becoming a shared language. Mirren’s Highsmith explains stranglings, drownings and poison to a young editor, who remains the object of her challenge. Her intelligence remains visible without erasing the description of her illness, drinking and misanthropy.

The change for Highsmith’s reputation is therefore specific rather than cosmetic. She becomes an active participant in the suspense, not a famous name used to advertise it. Authorship becomes evidence against the author. If the film sustains this balance between literary portraiture and psychological suspense, it will offer a new dramatic form for the Ripley stories: Highsmith confronting the character she created.