A Talent for Murder

In A TALENT FOR MURDER, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) is sent by his employer, a publishing house, to see reclusive author Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren) in her Switzerland home. It's 1995, and Ridgeway has been tasked with getting Highsmith to sign a contract promising a sixth Tom Ripley book. On the train there, he meets Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), who's on her way to visit her wealthy aunt (Juliet Stevenson). When Ridgeway meets Highsmith, sparks fly: She alternately toys with him and threatens to throw him out. When she teasingly begins outlining the new Ripley story, she asks him for a character name. He volunteers the name "Clementine Balfour," and then viewers start to see the new story unfold, as a new Ripley (Ehrenreich) romances Clementine, with his eye on the family fortune. But soon fiction becomes dangerously entwined with life.