Alden Ehrenreich’s character goes to Patricia Highsmith’s house hoping to leave with a book deal. He may leave with something far darker. In Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, the actor plays Edward, a young literary agent sent to persuade the famous writer to produce one more Tom Ripley novel. Helen Mirren plays Highsmith, who answers that request with an invitation to help plan a murder.
The setup makes Edward the audience’s way into an unsettling game. He has a job to do and a reason to be agreeable, but the conversation keeps pushing him toward the moral territory of Ripley, Highsmith’s charming and dangerous fictional creation. At a Toronto International Film Festival interview with TheWrap, Ehrenreich explained what separates the two men: “The Edward character is having a much harder time internally.”
Playing the unease beneath the manners
Ehrenreich described Ripley as much more comfortable with his own behavior. Edward, by contrast, must be pulled toward impulses he may not want to recognize. That gives the actor something subtler to play than a straightforward villain. His literary agent has to keep smiling in the room with Highsmith even as the offer in front of him becomes harder to dismiss.
The film’s trailer puts those roles across quickly. Edward arrives at the secluded home; Highsmith controls the conversation; and the proposed murder stops sounding like a harmless writing exercise. Mirren gives her version of the author a sharp, watchful presence. Ehrenreich’s Edward is attentive and increasingly cornered, a dynamic that gives the thriller its tension before anyone acts on the plan.
A house that closes in
Much of the movie takes place in Highsmith’s home in Switzerland. Ehrenreich told TheWrap that the production used the house’s corners and camera angles to make that large space feel tight. He said the team looked for “a few Hitchcockian kind of angles.” That is not just a visual flourish: the more Edward stays in the house, the less room he seems to have to remain an innocent visitor.
Corbijn directs from a screenplay by Joanna Murray-Smith, whose play Switzerland is the film’s source. This is a fictional thriller featuring Highsmith, not a documentary account of an actual murder plot. Olivia Cooke also appears in the cast. The distributor describes the central encounter as a duel between the young agent and the writer, rather than a conventional Ripley adaptation.
A Talent for Murder opens in US theaters October 23, according to Bleecker Street. For Ehrenreich, the role gives him a different kind of screen test: how long can Edward remain polite before the person he came to impress starts revealing who he might really be?
