TV Pick of the Week: Ripley - review by Yvette Huddleston

In early 1960s New York, Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) is living in a tiny, squalid apartment making a dishonest living as a petty criminal, defrauding people through a fake debt collection agency. He has the skills and equipment for forging false papers and accounts and mostly gets away with it, although sometimes he has to cut his losses and run. It’s a pretty grim existence and then along comes an opportunity. He is hired by wealthy shipping magnate Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan) to travel to Italy and persuade his son Dickie (Johnny Flynn), who has been living in Europe for years on a trust fund, to return home. So, he heads off on an all-expenses paid trip to the Amalfi coast. There he finds Dickie with his American girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning) and he inveigles his way into their lives, inventing a similarly privileged past for himself. Marge is suspicious but Dickie accepts him as a friend. Then things take a sinister turn…

Scott has proved himself several times over with a slew of brilliant performances on stage and screen, but here he is absolutely phenomenal. It’s hard to imagine anyone else being able to pull off the trick of eliciting sympathy for a cold-hearted, cool-headed, sometimes violent sociopath. Also, casting an older man as Ripley (Scott is 47) somehow adds an extra layer of poignancy. Here is someone who has been isolated, living on the margins, a nobody desperate to be a somebody, for a long time. There are brief, oblique references to childhood hardship and neglect. Scott has the unsettling ability to be warm and charming one minute, steely and menacing the next which he employs to perfection in this role.

Shot in black and white, the luminous monochrome cinematography underlines the film noir elements of the story and all the tropes of the genre – shadows, lines, spirals and steps – are present and correct. It is hauntingly beautiful and refreshingly unafraid to take its time – we are privy to Ripley’s thought processes – which allows the tension to mount almost imperceptibly but relentlessly, even before suave Roman detective Inspector Ravini (Maurizio Lombardi) begins his investigations. There will be moments when you may have to remind yourself to breathe. Exquisite.