There are two kinds of film made from a two-character play. The first keeps the door shut: it accepts that the play’s whole asset is pressure, two people and a room with nowhere to go, and it spends its money on faces and light. The second opens the door, because cinema can, and sends the camera out into the country while the pressure leaks quietly through the gap. Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her own 2014 play Switzerland, is built on the border between the two, and the reviews out of Toronto, which disagree about nearly everything else, agree on exactly where it stands: strongest inside the chalet, weaker every time it leaves.
The chalet
The premise is a chamber piece by design. In 1995 a young emissary from a New York publisher, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich, eagerness with uncertainty at its edge), is sent to the Swiss Alps to persuade Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren) to write one more Ripley novel. He is at least the second man sent; the first vanished. He brings what she cannot easily buy in Switzerland, her whiskey, shirts, a knife she has been wanting, and an encyclopedic knowledge of her books, and when neither amuses her she sets him a challenge that turns a hostile business meeting into a game. The set, as Front Mezz Junkies describes it, does half the work: a collection of antique weapons, shelves of poisons, a chalet with the air of a private laboratory for murder, and Highsmith introduced facing a blank page, which is where every writer’s menace begins. Cinema Scholars singles out the house for its design and the atmosphere it creates. Both notices, in other words, are describing an art department that understood the assignment, and I say that with a former focus puller’s respect for how rarely the room is given that much to do.
The chef op is Robbie Ryan, and the admiring reviews reach for the same adjectives: crisp, watchful, a carefully composed stillness, in Front Mezz Junkies’ phrase, suited to Highsmith’s fascination with concealed motives and managed appearances. Cinema Scholars adds the detail I would have asked about first, the use of shadow, with objects and figures emerging from the dark not as cheap shocks but as a way of disorienting the viewer and the characters at once. A Letterboxd reviewer puts it plainest: the lensing on Highsmith is superbly chosen, as is the lighting, and she looks formidable. That is a lighting plan with a thesis. You light a woman like a weapon on a shelf and the audience understands who owns the room before she has finished her first insult.
The second narrative
What the film adds to the play is a second strand, and here the critics divide. As Edward confides his hardscrabble childhood, his dead parents and the rich young woman, Clementine (Olivia Cooke, a welcome spark the script underuses), he met on the train, Highsmith sees the perfect murder story sitting across from her, and the film begins to dramatize the unwritten Ripley novel with Edward as Ripley and the heiress as his mark. Ehrenreich plays both men, and he told Spectrum News the attraction was precisely that, two characters with one influencing the other. Front Mezz Junkies finds the device hypnotic, the two strands reflecting and distorting one another until the act of creating a character resembles the act of uncovering one, and locates the turning point exactly: the moment Highsmith asks Edward to tell her how a woman in their co-created story is killed. Cinema Scholars credits Corbijn with melding the two narratives without confusion and hears Sleuth in the sparring, another two-hander from the stage.
The Film Stage hears something else: at least three jump scares with Highsmith appearing out of nowhere, a stream of one-liners pitched at the easy laughers, dramatizations set in nice Swiss locations that recall Corbijn’s The American without that film’s deliberate pacing, and, in sum, a competent mediocrity, specialty-box-office filler for an author who deserves better. I think the critic is unfair about the whole and precise about the parts. The jump scare is borrowed from the wrong genre; a chamber thriller earns its frights from what a face withholds, not from a cut, and three of them is a habit. The one-liners are the price of a stage script that was written to land in a theatre, and a director has to decide whether to film them or to bury them, and these were filmed. Where I part company is the verdict. A film in which the room, the light and the two leads are all working is not filler. It is a film with a structural debt, which is a different diagnosis.
The debt, and the ending
The debt is the door. Front Mezz Junkies, the warmest of the three notices, says the middle section loses momentum as the story branches outward, that the psychological contest gets buried under the machinery of the plot, and that the film struggles to sustain the claustrophobic tension the play’s setting promised. Enfin, that is the second kind of adaptation showing through the first. Every time the camera goes out to the train, the aunt (Juliet Stevenson), the imagined murder in handsome Italian and Swiss exteriors, it spends a little of the pressure the chalet had banked, and a thriller is a pressure vessel; it does not matter how beautiful the leak is.
A viewer at the Toronto premiere, who gave the film an eight and liked the two performers duking it out, confessed that the end slightly confused them as to what might or might not have happened, and wished for a little more. I take the complaint seriously and I will not dismiss it, because the warmest critic made the same one in different words: an ambitious, metafictional final turn, admired for ingenuity, whose deliberately ambiguous payoff did not deliver the expected jolt. Here is where I side with the film. The ambiguity is the design, two narratives built to blur, and a story that asks who is writing whom cannot close with a verdict without betraying its own premise. The jolt is another matter. Ambiguity you are owed by the film’s rules; a jolt you are owed by its craft, and the craft, by the account of people who liked it, did not quite deliver one. Tant pis. The ending is honest and a little flat, which is a better failure than dishonest and loud.
Placement and verdict
Highsmith has been well served by Europeans before, in Clément’s Plein soleil and Wenders’ The American Friend, films that understood her as a writer of surfaces under which something moves. Corbijn, a Dutchman shooting a Swiss, Australian, Italian, American and British co-production in her adopted country, belongs to that line by geography if not yet by achievement, and Mirren’s own description of the thing, a perverse thriller rather than a straightforward one, is the right ambition. The execution earns it in the room: the design, Ryan’s light, two performers (Mirren all sharp looks and poisonous traps, several moves ahead of everyone; Ehrenreich, as The Film Stage grudgingly admits, a face that holds a leading man and a killer at once) and a game worth watching. It loses some of it outside, in the branching and the borrowed shocks. Highsmith asked to be surprised. The film manages it about two times in three, which for this material is not nothing.
What it took
A five-country co-production, Switzerland, Australia, Italy, the United States and the United Kingdom, shot on location in Switzerland and Italy, with Robbie Ryan as cinematographer and Joanna Murray-Smith adapting her own 2014 play. A world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026 and a US theatrical release through Bleecker Street on October 23, 2026, playing nationwide, with a cast led by Helen Mirren, Alden Ehrenreich, Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson. The transferable item for anyone adapting a chamber play: the pressure in that room is the asset you bought, and every exterior on the schedule is a withdrawal from it, so budget the locations against the tension and not only against the days.
Part of the production detail here I owe to Front Mezz Junkies, Cinema Scholars, the Spectrum News conversation with Mirren, Ehrenreich and Corbijn, The Film Stage’s Toronto notice and a couple of Letterboxd diaries from the premiere.