Streaming review: Andrew Scott makes us fall in love with a monster in Ripley

There was, as the novelist Tony Parsons once noted, just one crucial flaw with the film. Matt Damon was badly cast as the titular Mr Ripley: Too handsome to be the shifty and empty anti-hero with a body rippling with LA trainer muscles, deeply out of place in the story’s 1950s setting.

And so the heart leaps in anticipation at the news that Patricia Highsmith’s source novel has been adapted again, this time as a TV series, created by Steven Zaillian (who won every award there is for his Schindler’s List screenplay) and with possibly the best actor working today in the title role: Andrew Scott.

The broader canvas of 10 episodes gives this dream team ample scope to stake out their own territory and treatment. Zaillian eschews the Gatsby-ish glamour and vivid sienna colours of ­Anthony Minghella’s film, and opts for Bergman-­esque black and white, which better fits the noir mystery feel of the story.

Scott’s Ripley is a small-time debt collector and conman, scrabbling to make a living in New York City until he is summoned to a lavish Upper East Side drawing room where Herbert Greenleaf, a shipping magnate, and his charity-dame wife, have a proposal.

Will he travel to the ­Amalfi coast and convince their son Dickie, who they believe is friends with Ripley, to come back to America and face up to adult life? In this moment, as in so many to come, Ripley’s black eyes shine with devious calculation: this proposal will be merely a pretext for something more darker and more exploitative.

Crisply and newly suited, he sets forth and arrives in an Italian town in which the initial difficulties – the language, the demented driving – are ­secondary to falling in with Dickie (Johnny Flynn) and his writer girlfriend Marge ­(Dakota ­Fanning).

Ripley’s conman sleight of hand semi-convinces them he and Dickie are old friends but this ensemble is much older than that of the 1999 film and there is, consequently, a plausibly heightened scepticism from the off, particularly from ­Fanning’s Marge, a woman who is being lied to and seems, on some level, to know it.

Eliot Sumner as the rakish Freddie Miles, Dickie’s best friend, is perhaps the sole character who both sees straight through Ripley from the off and says it to him – a crime for which he will pay.

The beauty of the setting seems to heighten the sense of menace as the eyes of antiquity look down judgingly on the mystery unfolding at the villa. Meanwhile, the viewer’s own eye is periodically plunged down into the black depths of the roiling sea below. It is both a mirror of Ripley’s black soul and a tool in his murderous grift.

​Each episode is nearly an hour long and Zaillian takes his time in ratcheting up the tension. The scenes in which Ripley’s scheme threatens to come undone explode like mini bombs.

It’s difficult to overstate how beautiful this series is to watch. Each scene could be hung in a gallery and Zaillian has completely reimagined the story – perhaps the only link back to Minghella’s film is the sound of O’Connor’s voice, as her spectral version of Silent Night rings out over a moonlit Italian street.

At the heart of it all is Scott’s towering performance. The whole thing is a study of his face, by turns ingratiating, psychopathically calm, and coolly scheming. In the hands of another actor, Ripley’s lack of redeeming features might have been a difficult watch but the Irish actor, with his casually flawless Italian, masterfully mines the deeply buried desperation and emptiness that drives this man against the slowly ticking clock.

And by the denouement of this gripping story you will have fallen in love with a monster.

Cops, Koreans and Colin Farrell: Three to watch

Sugar Apple TV+ Where is Colin Farrell? It’s a question that might have crossed the mind lately. It turns out the answer is, he’s playing a multilingual and hard-drinking private investigator who has to hunt for the missing daughter of a famous movie ­director. It’s dark, slick and fun.

Crime Scene Berlin: Nightlife Killer Netflix Operating (probably rightly) on the premise that we can never get enough true crime, Netflix has a story of a killer who terrorised Berlin’s gay clubs and of police who seemed bewildered and out of their depth in trying to navigate the subculture.

Parasyte: The Grey Netflix If you were raised on 1980s ­horror films you might have found recent series like The Last of Us a little subtle in their depiction of sci-fi parasites taking over human brains. In which case, this gory and sometimes silly Korean series has got you covered.