Helen Mirren astonishes as the legendarily malevolent Patricia Highsmith, in a sharp and unpredictable re-imagining of her last days.

In mid-1990s Switzerland, a young man from New York arrives at the great crime writer’s mountainside home, bearing a publisher’s request for a sixth Tom Ripley novel. When he survives her initial flood of rejection and verbal abuse, she challenges him to work out the plot with her – but its twists soon bleed into reality in unexpected ways, as neither has revealed their full hand. Joanna Murray-Smith adapts her hit play with director Anton Corbijn (Control, Life), and channels the luxuriant, merciless intrigues of Highsmith’s fiction; blending them with a penetrating look at the famously awful person behind them. Mirren inhabits her perfectly, but Alden Ehrenreich also flourishes as the unassuming, enigmatic outsider pitted against her.