A Talent for Murder includes acting

Channeling author Patricia Highsmith with A Talent for Murder, two stars fight to achieve what the writer mastered in her lifetime—getting audiences to care for characters they know they should hate. With Talent Helen Mirren activates the skill she shows as an outrageously evil woman in the series MobLand, she displays enough wit and humor to create both a compelling and repelling character. Alden Ehrenreich, widely known for his turn as the daring young Han Solo in a Star Wars spinoff movie, keeps up with Mirren’s verbal dexterity. The actors match wits in Director Anoton Corbijn’s adaptation of a stage play by Joanna Murray-Smith, a “what if” fantasy wondering what might have happened had the real-life Highsmith met up with her most famous creation, the talented Mr. Ripley. Ripley and Highsmith shared talents, basically finding clever ways to move up in the world—he by killing, she by inventing those murders and writing about them. With A Talent for Murder, Ripley transforms into literary agent Edward Ridgeway, using actor Ehrenreich’s ability to look nerdy behind glasses and shift to handsome Ripleyesque charm when he takes them off. Mirren sticks to the essence of Highsmith, mixing sly humor as a plus to offset the real author’s many difficult personality issues—adjectives like nasty, racist, misanthropic, and the like usually come up when people write about her. All this leads to an edgy story; no cozy comfort mystery, A Talent for Murder follows the Highsmith tradition of playing games, something movie watchers know about from various versions of Ripley along with screen adaptations of her other novels like Strangers on a Train.  With knowing references to Highsmith’s works—strangers really do meet on a train in one sequence—A Talent for Murder sticks to the spirit of its inspiration with dark and wordy complexities.