Is It a True Story?
Helen Mirren Plays Highsmith. The Story Is Fiction
Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder puts Dame Helen Mirren in the study of Patricia Highsmith, the American crime novelist who created Tom Ripley and died in Switzerland in 1995. The film is not a biopic of a documented case, and it is not an adaptation of a Highsmith novel. Joanna Murray-Smith wrote the screenplay from her own 2014 stage play Switzerland, inventing a late-life visit that never happened so she could put the author and her most famous creation in the same frame.
The year on screen is 1995. A young New York publishing emissary, Edward Ridgeway, travels into the Swiss Alps to coax Highsmith into one more Ripley book. She has already written five. He wants a sixth. What begins as a professional call turns into a psychological duel in which story, identity and appetite for harm keep changing hands. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 14 September 2026, opened in United States cinemas on 23 October 2026, and reaches UK and Irish screens on 20 November 2026.
Strangers on a Train, Again
The film opens with Mirren’s voice describing a young man boarding a train. Then the voice falls away and we watch Edward do exactly that. He has flown from New York, ridden out of Zurich, and is heading for the hillside village nearest Highsmith’s home. On the carriage he meets Clementine. She is visiting her aunt in the same region, hoping to secure a family inheritance. They discover they are both New Yorkers and both orphans. Edward is reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. The conversation glances at Strangers on a Train and Hitchcock’s film of it. Already the journey feels like a Highsmith pastiche that knows it is one.
Edward arrives knowing the gossip that trails Highsmith: that she is said to have poisoned a neighbour’s noisy dog, and that the publisher’s previous messenger disappeared after a similar visit. He is polite, slightly dishevelled, and under pressure to return with a signature. Highsmith greets him as an irritant. She is racist, antisemitic and casually vicious in the way several reviewers note the real Highsmith could be. She tries to break him early. He holds his ground by knowing her work too well to be dismissed as a tourist.
The Bunker and the Bargain
Highsmith’s house does a lot of the storytelling. Pine panelling, nicotine-stained paperwork, pill bottles, rows of poisons in the pantry, knives and guns displayed on the wall, even an aquarium of snails. She asks Edward for gifts that will sweeten any deal: Brooks Brothers shirts, Campbell’s soup cans, and another French hunting dagger for her collection. He brings them. He eats breakfast beside a bottle of poison. He refuses to leave.
What she wants more than supplies is proof that he understands how her fiction works. She begins to entertain a new Ripley narrative and pulls Edward into inventing it with her. The first murder idea is hers. Then she charges him with inventing another. The language matters. When she asks how he is going to murder “her,” the pronoun collapses the editor into the character they are making.
Rome, Ripley and the Heiress
As Highsmith and Edward draft, the film cuts into Rome. Ehrenreich appears there as a smoother, better-dressed Ripley figure; Cooke reappears as a fictionalised Clementine. The Rome passages borrow Highsmith’s favourite machinery: a poseur who cosies up to wealth, kills for it, and steps into someone else’s life. Robbie Ryan shoots Switzerland in cold Alpine glare and long shadows, and Rome in warmer, velvet noir. Ehrenreich’s physical shift between meek emissary and slick antihero is small — posture, voice, clothes — and that smallness is the point. Ripley is a social shapeshifter. So, increasingly, is Edward.
Away from the chalet, Edward runs into the real Clementine again. Their acquaintance deepens. He is drawn into her world and, eventually, to a party at her aunt Peggy’s grand, art-filled house. Juliet Stevenson’s Peggy looks, in Highsmith terms, like a ripe target: money, taste, a household that could absorb a charming stranger. The film keeps the Swiss drafting room, the Rome fantasy and the Alpine social plot in parallel until the boundaries between them start to look deliberate rather than messy.
What Happens at the End of A Talent for Murder?
The ending does not deliver a tidy whodunnit caption. Festival and release reviews agree on its shape rather than on a single diagram of corpses. Edward Ridgeway and Tom Ripley begin to merge. Highsmith’s drafting exercise and Edward’s behaviour in Clementine’s orbit stop looking like separate activities. The opening voiceover — Highsmith describing a young man on a train, then vanishing from the soundtrack — returns as a live question: has the audience been inside her invented story all along?
Guy Lodge, writing for Variety after the Toronto premiere, found the conceptually busy strands more satisfying in the build than in the knotting together, and described a film that wants to be both elegant slow burn and crowded psychothriller. Caryn James, for The Hollywood Reporter, argued that the film cannot quite carry the full weight of the existential questions about murder that it raises, while still calling the homage entertaining. Kate Erbland, for IndieWire, stressed that the film offers no neat answers to its multiplying characters and plotlines, and that the enduring mystery — how the pieces fit, or whether they are meant to — is part of the design.
The film leaves the viewer inside Highsmith’s favourite moral fog: we know who is capable of harm long before we know what has been done, and we are never fully sure whether the harm belongs to the manuscript, the memory, or the house in the mountains. Edward came for a contract. He leaves the story looking like a character she might have written, or like a man who learned too well how her characters move. The film’s last gesture is ambiguity about authorship and agency, not a courtroom reveal.
How the Film Connects to Ripley and Highsmith’s Real Life
Tom Ripley is Highsmith’s most famous invention: a charming American who murders, forges and impersonates his way into other people’s money and manners. The five novels are The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) and Ripley Under Water (1991). Screen adaptations run from René Clément’s Plein Soleil through Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film to the 2024 Netflix series Ripley. A Talent for Murder does not adapt any of those books. It borrows Ripley’s method — social mimicry, inheritance plots, the erotic charge of envy — and asks what happens when the author who made him is forced to share a room with a young man who might be learning the same skills.
Highsmith’s late Swiss years supply the film’s atmosphere more than its incidents. After decades in England and France she settled in Switzerland, commissioned the Tegna house, and wrote while increasingly isolated and unwell. She died of aplastic anaemia and lung cancer in 1995. Murray-Smith’s play, first staged by Sydney Theatre Company in 2014, takes that real isolation and invents a literary home invasion. Corbijn’s film keeps the invention and expands it with Rome sequences and a larger supporting world around Clementine.
If you came looking for a straight Highsmith biography, this is not it. If you came looking for a film that understands why Ripley still unsettles people — because he makes competence at harm look like manners — it is aiming at that nerve.
Where to Watch A Talent for Murder
In the United Kingdom and Ireland, the film opens in cinemas on 20 November 2026 through Universal Pictures and Focus Features. In the United States it has been in theatres since 23 October 2026 via Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment. Italy follows on 26 November 2026. As of 5 November 2026 there is no widely confirmed UK streaming date, so cinemas are the way to see it here. Check local listings closer to opening weekend for certificates, times and accessibility options.
How does the film end?
Without a neat puzzle-box solution. Reviews describe a deliberate blur between Highsmith’s drafted Ripley plot and Edward’s behaviour in the “real” Swiss story, and they flag the possibility that Highsmith’s early voiceover means more of the film belongs to her imagination than first appears.
Is it connected to the Netflix series Ripley?
Only thematically. It is a separate production about Highsmith and Ripley’s legacy, not a sequel or spin-off of the 2024 series.
Why the Ambiguity Fits Highsmith
Highsmith’s best work rarely comforts the reader with justice. Guilt, if it appears at all, is often useless. Charm is a weapon. Identity is something you can steal if you watch carefully enough. A Talent for Murder understands that inheritance and tries to stage it as a duel between maker and made. Mirren’s Highsmith is not softened into a quirky genius. She is difficult, funny and frightening. Ehrenreich’s double performance lets the film ask whether an editor who knows Ripley cold is already halfway to becoming him.
The film is sleek, handsome and, according to several major reviews, a little short of the full complexity it reaches for. That shortfall does not erase the central pleasure: watching an actor of Mirren’s force play an author who specialised in people who look ordinary until they are not. For viewers who want the border between Highsmith’s life and this fiction, the border is clear. The woman was real. The bunker was real. The visit, the sixth-book bargain and the perfect murder workshop are story.
Sources
A Talent for Murder (2026 film), Wikipedia (accessed 5 November 2026)
Bleecker Street, A Talent for Murder official page (accessed 5 November 2026)
Digital Spy, A Talent for Murder UK release date (8 October 2026)
Guy Lodge, Variety review (14 September 2026)
Caryn James, The Hollywood Reporter review (14 September 2026)
Kate Erbland, IndieWire review (14 September 2026)
Rotten Tomatoes, A Talent for Murder (checked 5 November 2026)
Metacritic, A Talent for Murder (checked 5 November 2026)
Patricia Highsmith, Wikipedia (accessed 5 November 2026)
