A Talent for Murder

“It’s bracingly fresh that in A Talent for Murder, Helen Mirren plays a queer, 74-year-old main character who’s kind of hateable.”

Title: A Talent for Murder (2026)
Director: Anton Corbijn 👨🏼🇳🇱
Writer: Screenplay by Joanna Murray-Smith 👩🏼🇦🇺 based on the play by Joanna Murray-Smith 👩🏼🇦🇺

Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸

—MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD—

Technical: 3.75/5

Based on the play Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith, A Talent for Murder immediately sets the tone with off-kilter, lurching music. Murray-Smith pens the screenplay as well, which centers on Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich), an editor sent from a New York publishing house to the secluded home of mystery novelist Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren) in Switzerland. His mission: to persuade Patricia to sign a contract for a sixth book in her ultra-popular Tom Ripley series.

If any of that sounds familiar, it’s probably because Highsmith is a real author, and the character of Tom Ripley really does anchor five of her novels. (Though the movie clarifies, “This portrayal of Patricia Highsmith and her life is entirely fictional.”)

For much of the film, Edward and Patricia swap plot ideas for this coveted sixth book. They narrate stories that play out on screen, with images weaving back and forth between the “real” setting of Patricia’s house and the made-up scenes of a fictionalized Edward frequenting chic Swiss bars and restaurants. Throughout each of these vignettes, though, Edward’s love interest, Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), is a fixture. Sometimes Edward and Patricia discuss Clementine as a character while brainstorming. Other times—such as during Edward’s initial train ride into Zurich, where he meets Clementine across the table from him—it’s implied that she’s flesh and blood. Through this hall of mirrors, Murray-Smith floats ideas about duplicity, fluid truths, and the capacity for evil in “good” people.

Despite its weighty topics, though, A Talent for Murder doesn’t draw any conclusions, preferring to remain oblique. It’s hard to go that deep when you’re unsure of every character’s backstory (or existence, even). Still, director Anton Corbijn entertainingly toys with perception. All the while, uneasy music, beautiful landscapes, and ornate buildings create a luxurious mood.

Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? NOPE

Between the main characters, Patricia and Edward, one is a woman who confidently calls herself a genius. It’s bracingly fresh, too, that Patricia is kind of hateable. She spits vile like a not-entirely lucid relative at the dinner table, saying how she left New York to avoid “the suits and the fools and the Jews and the Blacks and the Puerto Ricans and the Catholics and the Koreans.” (The exact language is probably devised, but biographies have captured multiple accounts of Highsmith’s racism and antisemitism.)

Clementine is another key character, but she’s a two-dimensional romantic interest, conveyed solely through Edward’s storytelling—sometimes literally described with his voiceover. She’s portrayed as an attractive, down-to-earth heiress who’s easy to manipulate.

Race: 1.25/5

Clementine is sometimes shown with a couple of friends. One of them, Tilly (Giuli Lin), is played by a multiracial Asian actor. But Lin barely has any lines, and the rest of the characters in this Switzerland-set movie are white.

Bonus for Age: +0.50

Mirren, 81 at the time of the film’s release, has a leading role. She plays Highsmith, who was 74 in 1995, when the story is set. Patricia slips into some clichés about aging, making offensive comments and being described as “dying,” but both details are based on Highsmith’s documented life, which mitigates the negative effect.

Bonus for LGBTQ: +0.25

Patricia brusquely accuses Edward of being a “f-g,” but she implies that she’s queer as well. In a line that’s already earned some appreciation for Mirren’s punchy, hilarious delivery, Patricia says, “I know a homo when I see one.” She then gestures to herself and adds, “for obvious reasons.” She also praises hermaphroditic snails copulating “with either gender, as either gender,” saying it sounds like “a lot of fun.” But beyond these details, Patricia’s sexual orientation doesn’t impact the plot.

Mediaversity Grade: C+ 3.25/5

Though the two titles share a word, A Talent for Murder is really not The Thursday Murder Club (2025). Mirren steals the show in both, but she goes deliciously darker in Corbijn’s film, which still manages to give cozy mystery vibes, thanks to gorgeous sets and Swiss scenery—with the bonus of ditching the genre’s cutesier trappings.

Like A Talent for Murder? Try these other titles that toy with perception.

Grade: CLiOctober 25, 2026Great for: Age