A Talent for Murder

[Corbijn] and his team have assembled a first-rate mystery that, like the best page-turners, keeps you guessing about what might happen until the very last frame.

The result feels like something entirely of the genre but also fresh. With the direction, writing, cast, and subject matter, A Talent for Murder is a splendid work of art.

It looks sumptuous and proceeds at an absorbing slow-burn pace as it reveals itself to be about doppelgangers and identity, the line between fiction and reality, and whether deep down we all have the capacity for murder.

Watching Ehrenreich slip into Tom Ripley’s skin is a hoot, but it’s more edifying watching him face off against Mirren. The film offers no neat answers to its many characters and plotlines, but perhaps that’s the real joy of the mystery: actual mystery, and an enduring obsession with how this all fits together. Maybe it doesn’t, but it’s sure fun to watch.

Anton Corbijn’s first narrative feature in 11 years luxuriates in the author’s stylish, sinister milieu as his two characters dream up a new book — one in which the editor himself becomes the protagonist. Helen Mirren brings a snippy panache to her portrayal of the misanthropic novelist, but the film’s excessive cleverness ultimately proves tiring rather than page-turning.

A Talent for Murder, while bolstering a clever story within a story premise, miscalculates the mechanics of a compelling chamber thriller and ends up being more meditative than riveting.

It doesn’t help that “A Talent for Murder” also refuses to be the chamber piece it’s clearly meant to be, and ditches a lot of the claustrophobia that almost certainly made it more effective on stage.