Ripley: a psychopath made for social media

Patricia Highsmith's charming devil has fascinated film-makers since the 1960s, but his brand of evil seems well suited to the Instagram age

- Peter Bradshaw

He's back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith's diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud.

He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian's sumptuous and instantly addictive eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer. It's a seven-star luxury hotel of a TV show in arthouse black-and-white.

It's set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott's Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability, attaining a hypnotic and insidious poise, his irises seeming to merge blackly with his pupils.

Ripley is seen at first in flophouse poverty in New York running petty scams with stolen cheques; he is then approached via a private detective by troubled wealthy plutocrat Herbert Greenleaf (played by Kenneth Lonergan), because Ripley once had a passing acquaintance with this man's wastrel son Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn.

Greenleaf Sr offers Ripley large sums of money to travel to Italy, where Dickie is lounging about with his girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning), and persuade Dickie to come home.