A Talent for Murder (2026 | United Kingdom | 106 minutes | Anton Corbijn)

Long ago, I decided the “separating the art from the artist” debate was trite and unproductive. I always default to the same position: you can (try to) pry my Patricia Highsmith novels from my cold, dead hands.

I don’t merely consider Highsmith one of the great authors of crime fiction; I think she is the greatest. As much as I enjoy Christie, Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, none of them can touch her when it comes to exploring the psychology of people who commit terrible acts, the ease with which they justify them, and the unsettling reality they may not be as different from us as we’d like to believe. Few understood the capacity for darkness in the human mind quite like Patricia Highsmith.

By all accounts, she was also a horribly unpleasant person.

This brings us to A Talent for Murder, a sly (if slight) psychological thriller about a young man in publishing who travels to Switzerland to try to convince Highsmith (played by Helen Mirren) to write a sixth book in her “Ripliad” series near the end of her life. For the uninitiated, the Ripliad consists of five novels featuring Tom Ripley, Highsmith’s charming, amoral, occasionally murderous antihero. The first was, of course, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and the last was Ripley Under Water (1991).

Alden Ehrenreich is Edward Ridgeway, the young man sent by her publisher to her remote Swiss home. Initially, he seems way out of his depth but earns a modicum of trust her by bringing her a knife as a gift and passing her test of identifying a passage she selects from any of her works. It did seem a little pedestrian, and un-Highsmith-like, to choose a few sentences from “The Heroine,” her first, and possibly most famous, short story.

While Highsmith wrote plenty of novels that couldn’t match Mr. Ripley or Strangers on a Train (crime novelists tend to be prolific so lesser works are basically inevitable), I couldn’t imagine her as being anything other than appalled by this movie. There’s also a certain irony in the fact that this movie is set in 1995, the year of her death, when her American publisher, Knopf, had actually rejected her final novel, Small g: a Summer Idyll. That’s the thing with A Talent for Murder. It plays like literary wish fulfillment.

That’s not to say it’s unworthy of your time, or mine. I’m certain Helen Mirren had a blast playing the notoriously prickly author, and she’s practically unrecognizable. If you told me I was watching Alan Cumming in drag, I would’ve believed you. Alden Ehrenreich does a good job matching wits with Mirren. Best of all are the scenes where Highsmith and Ridgeway work out a potential outline of the next Ripley book.

A Talent for Murder is an entertaining bit of magical thinking. I enjoyed spending time with Helen Mirren’s fictionalized Highsmith, even if I suspect the real one would have wanted nothing to do with it.

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A Talent for Murder opens in select theaters today, October 23, 2026.