Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, a fictional story that vividly captures the psychology of Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren), is the rare successful film about a writer. At the start, Highsmith is feeling gloomy and blocked, staring at a blank sheet of paper in her typewriter carriage. That is, until book editor Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) appears at her door, begging her to start writing again. From there, the film slices away at the usual biopic folderol to unveil the dark linkages between the writer and her most famous creation.

Set in 1995, the year of Highsmith’s death, A Talent for Murder is based on Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland. The story’s conceit is that Ridgeway has been tasked by his New York publishing house to wheedle a sixth Ripley novel out of Highsmith. Things start off as a battle of wits between a mild-mannered fanboy and a dyspeptic misanthrope who can’t decide whether to throw him out or keep him around as a plaything. That seemingly straightforward narrative is delectably twisted by pulpy insinuations evocative of the author’s work. Highsmith leaves bottles of poison around, fondles a terrifyingly long knife, and drops hints about the editor who previously visited her abode before supposedly going mad and disappearing.

The film efficiently sets up Highsmith as a bitter recluse and hateful drunk, holed up in a gorgeous Swiss eyrie and spitting out venom about Jews, Black people, and just about all humans. Perched in her chair like a gargoyle wreathed in cigarette smoke and scotch fumes, she eyes the anxious Ridgeway with a smoldering contempt he tries to fan into curiosity. His piercing questions about Ripley grow more intrusive as he cuts past the very thin veneer separating Highsmith from the amoral, murderous con artist she clearly sees as a kindred spirit.

Whether to deflect Ridgeway’s questions or to kickstart her imagination, Highsmith suggests a game. The two spin ideas for a new Ripley story, depicted in a film within the film. In that story, Ehrenreich plays Ripley in a more predatory and obviously romantic register than the tweedy Ridgeway, whose masculinity Highsmith mocks. All the better to attract Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), a credulous, big-eyed American whose name is inspired by the woman (also played by Cooke) Ridgeway met on the train to Highsmith’s. After Ripley discovers Balfour will inherit a fortune once two elderly relatives pass away, the game is afoot.

Highsmith and Ridgeway barely repress their glee while working out how Ripley will most efficiently and secretly murder his way to Balfour’s money. When Highsmith tells Ridgeway, “You kill the aunt,” his eyes light up as though an Olympian had just handed him a torch.

A Talent for Murder’s wintry palette and feel for unostentatious European wealth—Highsmith’s home is more woody modernist hotel than residence—project a modish beauty that recalls Corbijn’s stately 2010 thriller The American, starring George Clooney. But that stateliness is undercut by an air of malevolent mystery. Threaded into those two storylines is a third in which Ridgeway, escaping Highsmith’s dungeon of a home, awkwardly romances the Balfour he met on the train. The cross-cutting between Ridgeway and Ripley, and their parallel seductions of different Balfours, quickly blurs where one man ends and the other begins.

Highsmith would likely have resented, if not outright hated, A Talent for Murder, simply for depicting her in a way the controlling author could never have controlled. But just as the fictional Highsmith grudgingly respects Ridgeway for having done his homework on her, the real author might have appreciated the film’s insights about her work.

Unlike some Highsmith adaptations, like Wim Wenders’s The American Friend and Steven Zaillian’s Ripley miniseries for Netflix, Corbijn’s film displays a clear understanding not just of Ripley’s appeal but of the compulsions that power the character. The performances help this along: Mirren’s crabbed and precise antagonism, Ehrenreich’s slipperiness, and Cooke’s beguiling naïveté all smartly channel archetypes from the books.

Corbijn’s success goes beyond making an elegant and witty potboiler. Making us care even a bit about what happens to the faux-Ripley, and whether he can carry out his schemes, elevates the film past fan fiction to something approximating what is so compelling about the novels. In a sense, Corbijn has made a sixth Ripley story. And Highsmith definitely would have hated that.