Corbijn, working in a minor key between his more muscular outings, shoots the Swiss lakes and drawing rooms with the cool precision of a magazine spread. Every frame is composed, every reflection placed just so. It is beautiful and a touch embalmed - a film about a writer of suspense that often forgets to generate any.
Mirren is the reason to buy a ticket. She plays Highsmith not as a monster but as a woman thoroughly bored by other people's needs, delivering barbs with the offhand cruelty of someone who stopped apologizing decades ago. It is a performance of wit and control, and it gives the film whatever electricity it has. Ehrenreich has the harder job. Edward is meant to shift from eager admirer to something darker, and the actor makes the early ingratiation convincing - too convincing, perhaps, because the turn never lands with the snap it needs. He is a portrait of neediness, not danger, and the film's central tension slackens accordingly.
Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson do what they can with supporting roles that are largely there to be observed by Edward and, eventually, by us. The dialogue is often sharp, occasionally arch. "You want a book," Highsmith tells Edward at one point, "and I want to be left alone." That line is the whole movie in miniature - an old genius and a young striver locked in a room, one of them far more interesting than the other.
The film also feels oddly frictionless for a story that promises moral rot. The sinister turn creeps in politely rather than insidiously, and the 106-minute runtime passes without the tightening screw of dread that Highsmith's own work so reliably supplies. There is a great film buried in this material about authorship as possession, about what a fan will do to become a collaborator. Corbijn and his writers circle it without ever digging in.
Still, the mood lingers. The snow, the mirrors, the suspicion that everyone in the room is writing a version of everyone else. A Talent for Murder is a film with a good pedigree and a maddening refusal to bare its teeth.
