Ripley Review

Zaillian wrote and directed all eight episodes and Robert Elswit shot them in black and white; both won Emmys, and the look is the show's argument. Atrani, Rome, Palermo and Venice become stairways, stone and shadow, with Caravaggio's paintings recurring as the one art Tom truly responds to. Nothing is hurried. A climb up a flight of steps can take what feels like minutes, and a long sequence in a small boat off Sanremo is staged with the patience of a procedure.

Andrew Scott is two decades older than Highsmith's Tom and plays him as a man with no visible interior, watching, copying, calculating; Time's Judy Berman called it the first definitive screen Ripley. Johnny Flynn's Dickie is a dilettante whose charm has limits, Dakota Fanning's Marge sees through Tom before anyone else does, and Eliot Sumner's Freddie Miles is a memorably unsettling presence.

The deliberation is also the cost. With sparse dialogue and less warmth, some episodes feel like a stately exercise, and admirers of Matt Damon's needy Ripley in Anthony Minghella's 1999 film will find this one chilly by design. As visual filmmaking it has few equals on television.