Netflix’s Mesmerizing New Series Goes Darker and Deeper Than Ever on One of the Great Villains

This post contains spoilers for Ripley.

Filmmakers love Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, a thriller set on the visually luscious Amalfi Coast, in Rome, and finally in a Venetian palazzo. In both 1960’s Purple Noon, directed by René Clément and starring Alain Delon, and 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Matt Damon and Jude Law, the story has been a showcase for beautiful young actors, tanned and occasionally shirtless in sexually ambiguous situations. The exploits of Tom Ripley—a small-time con man who murders and then assumes the identity of the rich wastrel Dickie Greenleaf—testify to how far you can rise in life with an aptitude for impersonation and manipulation, a lesson no actor can fail to appreciate.

The latest adaptation—originally for Showtime, and now for Netflix, by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List)—might at first seem surplus to need, especially at a leisurely eight-episode length, but Zaillian has a striking new take. Ripley is shot in black and white, its cinematic images as precisely etched as Ansel Adams photographs. Zaillian’s star, Andrew Scott, is no golden boy. Scott’s Ripley is a cipher, his eyes like glassy black marbles, his manner blandly pleasant, except when in the presence of some old-world masterpiece—the Grand Canal of Venice, Caravaggio’s The Calling of Saint Matthew, or a really, really nice hotel—when he allows ecstasy to wash across his pale face. The choice to film Ripley in black and white at first seems like a nod to Italian neorealism (the series is set in the early ’60s), but the frequent cuts to shots of antique statues and carvings, the chiaroscuro shadows swathing Ripley’s movements, soon make it clear that this incarnation of Ripley is neither sun-washed thriller nor gritty social commentary. This Ripley is gothic.

The menace always lurking in Scott, used to campy effect when he played Moriarty in Sherlock, flickers to the surface in this role. He’s scary, but still you can’t help rooting for him. The series begins by sketching out Ripley’s shabby existence in New York, running two-bit frauds by stealing mail from doctors’ offices and posing as a collection agent on the payphone in the hallway of his squalid boardinghouse. The material world is a veritable character in Zaillian’s series. Every rusty shower head, portable typewriter, and rickety bus gearshift is presented as vividly as a person. When Ripley, later on in the series, achieves his takeover of Dickie’s identity, he consecrates each new hotel room or apartment he occupies by ritually setting out four handsome objects stolen from his victim: a travel alarm clock, a bottle of cologne, a cigarette case, and a camera. Things are the nexus of Ripley’s universe.

In New York, he gets his shot at the good stuff when Dickie’s wealthy father (Kenneth Lonergan), mistakenly believing Ripley to be a good friend of his son’s, hires him to travel to the Italian village where Dickie (Johnny Flynn) has rented a villa and persuade him to come back to the States. When he arrives, Ripley is immediately taken with Dickie’s posh, leisurely lifestyle, but less so with the other man’s sort-of girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), and with Dickie’s terrible paintings, which serve in part as a justification for tarrying in Italy. Marge doesn’t like Ripley much, either, but the nature of her suspicion isn’t initially clear. Ripley disarms Dickie by immediately revealing that he’s been sent by Dickie’s father, a calculating choice that sets him up as Dickie’s ally against his tiresome parents. Dickie, to Marge’s displeasure, invites Ripley to move into the villa with him.

In Highsmith’s novel, the reader has access to Ripley’s thoughts and feelings, at least to the extent that Ripley understands them himself. His sexuality remains murky, but so does Dickie’s. Marge’s suspicion that Ripley is “a queer” really amounts to the fear that Dickie is. In truth, behind his rich man’s facade of ease, Dickie is more uncertain than Ripley. In an uncharacteristic (and possibly possessive?) moment of vehemence in the series, Ripley dismisses a friend of Dickie’s (played by nonbinary actor Eliot Sumner) as “such a fraud,” a rich dilettante merely posing as a playwright. “I come from money, so am I a fraud?” Dickie asks Ripley with uncharacteristic vulnerability. Even after Dickie catches Ripley in his room, dressed in Dickie’s clothes (down to, in a nice touch added by Zaillian, the underwear), acting out a scene of rejecting Marge in Dickie’s voice, he doesn’t throw Ripley out. But is it because Dickie secretly desires Ripley or because he feels affirmed by the fact that someone else wants so badly to be him?

We’ll never know. Marge persuades Dickie to embrace coupledom, and to jettison Ripley. Dickie makes the catastrophic decision to tell Ripley this while the two men are on a motorboat in the Mediterranean. Ripley promptly bashes his head in with an oar, ties his body to the anchor and drops it overboard, then sinks the boat and skips town, posing as Dickie and using his forgery skills to draw on Dickie’s trust fund. He rents a lovely apartment full of antiques in Rome and sends Marge a letter saying he (Dickie) wants some time apart.

From the moment Ripley clubs Dickie with that oar, his romance with objects also becomes a kind of war. Refreshingly, Ripley isn’t one of those stories of a brilliant criminal expertly managing and concealing his deeds. The series is committed to depicting the sheer physical difficulty of disposing of a corpse and a bloodstained boat. Later, when Ripley must commit another murder to hide the first one, the job of covering it up is even more arduous and the mess harder to clean. Despite the suspicion he sometimes arouses, Ripley, with a bit of luck, succeeds pretty well at manipulating people. Things are more recalcitrant, and what is a corpse if not an inconvenient person transformed into an even more inconvenient thing? The series lingers over the steps Ripley must take to assume Dickie’s identity and fortune, and to elude a persistent but not-too-clever police detective. It becomes a procedural for sociopaths.

Highsmith’s Ripley is just that. He believes that he deserves the life that Dickie does not, so he takes it. Highsmith describes him leaving the scene of Dickie’s murder by train, savoring the accommodations in his first-class berth and enjoying “an ecstatic moment when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure.” He goes to sleep, “happy, content, and utterly confident, as he had never been before in his life.” Zaillian’s Ripley is much less transparent. On the same train ride, the camera closes in on Scott’s face for nearly a minute, inviting the viewer to imagine his feelings. Relief at getting away? Horror at the realization that he’s killed a friend, or a man he might have loved? Anticipation of the new life before him? Or just a frantically methodical review of everything he must do to obscure his crime?

Still, we want him to get away with it. Ripley is a murderer, but also a hero, overcoming daunting obstacles to get what he wants. His struggles upward—one of the series’ recurring images is of long stairways—make him sympathetic in spite of his crimes. In his defense, Highsmith’s Ripley would argue that he merits the things he takes from others more than they do, a morally bankrupt position, but he does have a point. Even Marge, who seems to genuinely care for Dickie, ends up exploiting her connection to his disappearance to get her photographs published in magazines and to hobnob with the Venetian socialites who have taken up Ripley as a titillating curiosity. Ripley has nothing but contempt for them and most other rich people, a contempt that is easy to share.

But how talented is Ripley, really? Zaillian echoes Highsmith’s suggestion that Ripley’s taste elevates him above his victims, and taste, after all, is a heightened appreciation of things. The series takes this idea further by having Ripley respond to Caravaggio’s paintings with a nearly spiritual veneration. In the final episodes, the series cuts to scenes from the painter’s life; he, too, was a murderer and a scoundrel, and most likely a lover of men and boys. But Caravaggio was also a great artist, supremely talented where Ripley’s talents are minor. Maybe we think Caravaggio’s work makes up for his crimes, and perhaps that’s not so different from the way the hugely entertaining spectacle of Ripley’s cleverness makes us want him to succeed even though he’s a monster.

Or maybe that’s just something Ripley tells himself, that he is a superior being to whom the usual rules do not apply. (Something, it’s worth pointing out, that the rich also tend to believe.) By toning down the glamour in his mesmerizing adaptation, Zaillian heightens these unsettling questions. His is the darkest Ripley yet, lonelier and darker even than Highsmith’s, and deeper, too.