Readers beware. This is not an easy book to read, nor film to watch. But, and it’s not often I say this, Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is astonishingly good, in some ways even better than the book.

The strength of the novel is in the way it brings the reader into an eerie intimacy with the serial killer at its centre. You feel a little too close. Not just learning more than you wanted to learn, but feeling more than you wanted to feel about what moves Tom Ripley.

And what is that? Envy. The desire to possess. A bottomless, craven desire to have everything, and everyone, for himself. Running alongside that need, feeding it, is a calculating inventory of all the things he wants and does not have. All the ways he is slighted, left out of other people’s lives, denied a seat at the table.

To begin, Highsmith constructs a situation that would challenge anyone. Tom Ripley has nothing. Orphaned as a baby, he was brought up by a hateful aunt who offers him little beyond threadbare existence. He moves along as soon as he can, but with little in the way of resources, not even a real education. A “sissie,” in 1950s terms, he is doubly excluded from the life all around him. When the book opens, he is living a Dickensian existence as an impoverished clerk in New York City.

In his spare time, he forges signatures and forms, using his job as a tax collector to trick random people into thinking they owe the IRS more than they do, just to see if they will send him a cheque he can pocket. A sick, lonely game.

And then, a chance encounter with Richard Greenleaf, the parent of someone he has met only in passing, offers him a glimpse of everything he has never known. He finds himself pretending he went to Princeton with Richard’s son, Dickie. He is shortly after recruited into the family he has never had, and invited to travel, all expenses lavishly paid, to Italy, to find Dickie and persuade him to come home to work in the family business.

While most entertainments import us into the high life — Downton Abbey, the White Lotus — and that is, if we are honest, much of the source of their appeal, Highsmith goes a step beyond such easy pleasures. She dissects class aspiration. Tom Ripley manifests the infantile envy and desire — carefully sublimated and controlled — that drive all status seeking. The primitive needs that drive Ripley, and which he is helpless to control, run into the highly polished performances of successful social life. The result is uncomfortable, to say the least. We find ourselves bit too proximate.

Minghella’s film adaptation brings all of this to vivid life, almost literally moving us from black and white letters on a page, little forgeries of real life, to moving, brilliant colour. The deprived Tom Ripley — Matt Damon, who manages to make him both sinister and sympathetic — of Highsmith’s deliberately suffocating character study is plunged into a world of sounds, lights, and pleasures. A series of splendid performances, from Kate Blanchett and Gwyneth Paltrow to an unforgettable turn from Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddie, fill out the scenes of high life.

After a first-class ocean crossing, Tom finds himself enjoying fine lunches on hilltop terraces overlooking the sea, as well as jazz and dinner clubs, art, gossip, and fun, for the first time in his life.

Two things become clear: there is no going back for Tom Ripley, and he is in the film’s second half going to pay dearly for stealing a place in its first. As are we.

Jude Law plays Dickie Greenleaf here, and he is perfect. Gorgeous, tanned, young, and charming, he is also careless with others, easily, naturally self-indulgent and entitled. He is someone to both love and hate. And Tom does.

To commit forgery is to replace a real person with an imitation. Tom wants Dickie, or what Dickie has, so badly, that when he is, inevitably, rejected, he decides to simply replace Dickie, take over his life, forge an imitation of it.

The question at the center of Highsmith’s novel, of course, is how could he not? Minghella’s film, too, asks, what separates the filmgoer from someone who could first lie and then murder their way into the dazzling life dangled before us on the screen, if offered the opportunity? Human nature and civilized culture come up against one another in this story for the ages, which unfolds as relentlessly as a Greek myth. 

The Talented Mr. Ripley screens at The Regent on Monday 5 May at 7:00pm.