Mirren as Highsmith: A Talent for Murder and the Pleasure of Meta-Casting

By Andy — 2026-08-29 — Literary News

I watched the trailer yesterday morning. Two minutes of Helen Mirren in a Swiss chalet, all cheekbones and suspicion, playing the woman who invented Tom Ripley.

There's something almost too neat about it.

Not neat in a bad way. The film—called A Talent for Murder, arriving October 23—is adapted from Joanna Murray-Smith's 2014 play Switzerland, and the premise is exactly the sort of thing that sounds clever in a pitch meeting but could very easily collapse into gimmick. A young literary agent from New York shows up at Highsmith's door in the Alps, trying to extract one final Ripley novel. She's lived there like a recluse, guarding secrets and weapons and a lifetime of very dark ideas. He leaves convinced she's trying to kill him—or teach him how.

Actually, that's not quite right. Not convinced. More that things take a turn, as things do when you put two people in a room and one of them spent forty years writing about elegant sociopaths.

The real pleasure here is that Mirren is the work. She doesn't just play Highsmith. She embodies the kind of intelligence—dangerous, spare, unforgiving—that lives inside the Ripley novels. The casting isn't a stunt. It's the film understanding what it's actually about: not Highsmith's life, but her sensibility. The way she saw the world.

Anton Corbijn directs, which suggests the thing will be cold and precise. He made Control and A Most Wanted Man. He knows how to frame a person alone in a room and make it unbearable. Alden Ehrenreich plays the agent—earnest, hungry, doomed—and Olivia Cooke is somewhere in there too, though the trailer doesn't quite show you why.

The Ripley books have been adapted so many times now that you wonder what's left to say. Clément made a film. Minghella made a film. Wenders made a film. Netflix put Andrew Scott in one a few years back. The con man travels, the con man lies, the con man does something unforgivable and we watch him rationalize it. Each director finds different angles, different light. But they're all pointing at the same character.

Focusing on Highsmith herself is different. It's asking: what kind of mind invents this? What does that intelligence look like when it's not filtered through Tom's perspective? Mirren, at this stage of her career, doesn't have to answer that question nicely. She can answer it coldly. She can answer it the way Highsmith herself probably would have.

October 23. I'll be there.

Source: "Starring Helen Mirren, the film reimagines the final chapter of Patricia Highsmith's life through a fictional encounter with an ambitious young literary agent, played by Alden Ehrenreich." — World of Reel