LOS ANGELES — Patricia Highsmith has been dead for thirty-one years, and the movie business still cannot leave her alone. Hollywood has filmed her charming killers for seven decades, from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train through The Talented Mr. Ripley and Netflix’s monochrome Ripley. The new wrinkle is that the industry has finally decided the most filmable character Highsmith ever produced was Highsmith, and it has handed the part to Helen Mirren.
Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment have acquired U.S. rights to A Talent for Murder, Anton Corbijn’s thriller starring Mirren as the novelist, with Alden Ehrenreich and Olivia Cooke opposite her, Variety reported on Tuesday. The distributors are planning a theatrical release this fall.
The deal says as much about the specialty market as it does about the film. Adult literary dramas have become the contested ground of theatrical distribution, the titles mid-size buyers fight over precisely because the streamers stopped overpaying for them. A Mirren two-hander with a marquee director and pre-sold source material is the kind of fall play that can hold art-house screens for weeks, and it lands in the same week the trades carried a run of prestige packaging news, including Gus Van Sant circling a Hoyt Richards biopic built on a similar real-life-into-fiction premise.
The setup is a chamber piece with teeth. Ehrenreich plays a young New York literary agent dispatched to Switzerland to persuade a reclusive, late-career Highsmith to write one final installment of the Ripley anthology. She deploys her famously macabre imagination to frighten him off. A collaboration follows anyway, and the world the two of them construct becomes, in the film’s telling, indistinguishable from the real one. Joanna Murray-Smith adapted the screenplay from Switzerland, her own 2014 play, which has been a steady presence on stages since its Sydney premiere. Cooke’s role is being kept under wraps.
Corbijn is a natural hire for material about an artist weaponizing her own mythology. The Dutch photographer turned filmmaker built his reputation on Control, his Ian Curtis study, and the le Carré adaptation A Most Wanted Man, work that lives in exactly the chilly, composed register Highsmith’s prose occupies.
Kent Sanderson, Bleecker Street’s chief executive, framed the acquisition as a reunion, calling the film Corbijn’s “captivating ode” to Highsmith’s lively spirit and to the work itself. The language is warmer than the film sounds, which is probably the point of distribution executives everywhere.
The LD partnership is the structural story underneath. Mickey Liddell and Pete Shilaimon called the project exactly the kind of film their shop exists to make, and the two companies have history to back the claim: Bleecker Street and LD have released Bone Lake, I.S.S., Teen Spirit, Megan Leavey and Anthropoid together, and they have the Hadestown stage capture arriving in theaters on July 24. A buyer pairing that has survived six releases is, in the current specialty economy, practically a studio.
The producer roll call runs deep. Gabrielle Tana of Magnolia Mae produces alongside LD’s Liddell and Shilaimon, with Brouhaha’s Troy Lum and Andrew Mason, Lunar Pictures’ Jim Robison and Kurt Martin, Carolyn Marks Blackwood, Karl Spoerri and Andrea Occhipinti. Head Gear Films and Metrol Technology financed with LD, and FilmNation is handling international sales, an arrangement that suggests the foreign map was largely sold before the U.S. deal closed.
What nobody has disclosed is the price, the exact date inside that fall corridor, or the festival plan. A late-year Mirren vehicle with this pedigree points naturally toward a Venice or Telluride launch, the runway that feeds the awards conversation already taking shape since Cannes, but neither distributor has said so, and the filmmakers have not commented beyond the announcement.
Mirren, 80, keeps choosing parts that let her play intelligence as a form of menace, and Highsmith offers the purest version of that available in the biographical canon: a writer whose great trick was making readers root for the murderer, and whose own letters and diaries revealed a person quite capable of frightening a houseguest for sport. Casting her opposite Ehrenreich, an actor who specializes in earnest men slightly out of their depth, is the joke and the engine at once.
Highsmith spent a career insisting the line between imagining a crime and committing one was thinner than polite society wanted to believe. The film that now bears her face is betting a fall theatrical run on the same proposition, and on the durable pleasure of watching Helen Mirren make a young man very, very nervous in a house in the Alps.
