
Ripley's Game
Crime, Thriller
Tom Ripley - cool, urbane, wealthy, and murderous - lives in a villa in the Veneto with Luisa, his harpsichord-playing girlfriend. A former business associate from Berlin's underworld pays a call asking Ripley's help in killing a rival. Ripley - ever a student of human nature - initiates a game to turn a mild and innocent local picture framer into a hit man. The artisan, Jonathan Trevanny, who's dying of cancer, has a wife, young son, and little to leave them. If Ripley draws Jonathan into the game, can Ripley maintain control? Does it stop at one killing? What if Ripley develops a conscience?
View on IMDbAppeals to viewers who enjoy elegant psychological games, morally compromised protagonists, and slow-building criminal tension over overt action.
- Tone
- cerebral, tense, bleak
- Payoff
- unease, revelation
- Pacing
- steady
- Intensity
- intense
- Structure
- linear
- Themes
- moral corruption, manipulation, desperation, family, conscience
- Setting
- contemporary Europe, affluent villa and shadowy urban underworld