Name: A Talent for Murder
Director: Anton Corbijn
Genre: Drama, Crime, Thriller
Released: 2026-10-23T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 106 min
Cast: Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke, Juliet Stevenson, James Faulkner

The publicity still does most of the selling on its own. Helen Mirren, as Patricia Highsmith, holds a long dagger upright in both hands, the blade raised close to her face, wearing a white shirt buttoned to the collar under a brown knitted waistcoat; behind her, out of focus, Alden Ehrenreich sits in dark-rimmed glasses and watches her and the knife. A wall lamp glows amber in the corner and the rest of the room falls into warm shadow. The picture puts a crime novelist and a weapon in the same frame, which is close to the whole premise of A Talent for Murder.

Anton Corbijn’s film, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her own stage play Switzerland, sends a young emissary from Highsmith’s New York publisher to her remote Swiss home with one job: to persuade the author to write one more Tom Ripley novel. She will only consider it if he helps her work out a murder that could go undetected, and the book they start inventing begins to borrow from his own life. After its North American opening and a German run, the thriller now arrives in British and Irish cinemas, at a moment when Highsmith’s con man is back in circulation, revived on television by Steven Zaillian’s Ripley.

The casting tells you which film Corbijn wanted to make. Mirren has built a late career on playing real women with public faces, and Highsmith, who moved to a small town in Switzerland in the 1980s and withdrew further from the world each year, is the least cuddly of them. Mirren has not tried to soften her. “She was not a very nice person at the end of her life at all,” she told AFP during the Toronto festival, arguing that “it would do her a disservice to try and smooth over the edges that she very much had.” Ehrenreich, a Tony winner whose screen résumé runs from Solo: A Star Wars Story to Fair Play and Weapons, gets the trickier assignment: according to the AV Club, he plays both the nervous junior agent and the Ripley-like figure at the centre of the novel the two of them are making up. Olivia Cooke, of House of the Dragon, plays Clementine, the young American Edward meets on the train, who, in the AV Club’s description, “becomes an inspiration for the writing exercises” he does with Highsmith.

Corbijn came to cinema from photography, as the photographer of Joy Division and U2, and the reputation of his features, from Control to The American and A Most Wanted Man, rests largely on how they look. This is his first narrative feature in 11 years, Screen International notes, and he has hired a cinematographer known for texture: Robbie Ryan, a regular collaborator of Andrea Arnold and Yorgos Lanthimos, who according to Screen shot on film and “gives the story a moody warmth.” The reviews describe a film with two climates. The real story stays in the snow around Highsmith’s Swiss house; the novel-in-progress moves to Rome and Italian palazzos, with production design by Dimitri Capuani and costumes by Gabriella Pescucci, and the Austin Chronicle’s critic wrote that Corbijn and Ryan “shoot the palazzos of Italy in a way that made this American bumpkin swoon.”

The premise is less interested in who dies than in who writes it. Edward arrives knowing that the last person the New York office sent to Highsmith never came back; the Austin Chronicle notes that his suits are still hanging in her guest bedroom. Screen’s review says she dismisses the newcomer “as a lowly intern”; then, as the pair start brainstorming a plot, Edward begins “pulling from his own life and his train encounter with Clementine,” in Screen’s words. The set-up suggests a film about authorship as complicity: the novelist needs a killer’s imagination, and the fan who wants another Ripley may turn out to have more of it than she does. TheWrap called the result “a tense and playful little chamber piece riff on murder mysteries.”

That is the reading the material offers, and the critics are far from sure the film delivers on it. Screen International called it underwhelming and concluded that “the film’s excessive cleverness ultimately proves tiring rather than page-turning,” while The Film Stage dismissed it as “the definition of a competent mediocrity.” The AV Club, warmer overall, still found that Corbijn “can’t quite break out of the stageyness” of a story largely confined to one house, which is the price of adapting a play built around two characters. There is also a question the film never has to answer: how much of this is Highsmith. The setting is the last year of her life, but the plot is invented, and the Austin Chronicle describes a portrait “playing fast and loose with the facts.” Anyone hoping for a biography of the author of Strangers on a Train will find a thriller that borrows her name and her temper, not her life.

Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith sits at a desk in front of bookshelves in A Talent for Murder (2026) — Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith in *A Talent for Murder* (2026)

Mirren, Ehrenreich and Cooke lead a cast that also includes Juliet Stevenson as Peggy, Clementine’s aunt, along with James Faulkner and Bríd Brennan. Murray-Smith, the Australian playwright whose Switzerland had its American premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, wrote the screenplay. Producers include Gabrielle Tana, Mickey Liddell, Pete Shilaimon, Troy Lum and Andrea Occhipinti, whose Italian company Lucky Red co-produced alongside Zurich Avenue, Lunar Pictures and LD Entertainment, while FilmNation Entertainment handles international sales. The film runs 106 minutes and is rated R in the US.

A Talent for Murder had its world premiere as a Gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2026, and Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment opened it in US cinemas on October 23. It reaches cinemas in the UK and Ireland on November 20, 2026, after a festival screening in Inverness, and Australian audiences, who first saw it at the British Film Festival, get a theatrical release on December 26.