For attempting to blur the line between fiction and reality, A Talent for Murder gets lost around this border, dipping its toes in and out of both realms in hopes of finding something profound about the nature of writing about murder. This isn’t a bad idea, considering how well it worked for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in highlighting the appeal and obsession with slasher movies. But while that film tapped into something spiritual and sexual, Anton Corbijn’s film is less a whodunnit and more a who-cares.

The film presents a fictionalized version of author Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren), best known for her books featuring the character Tom Ripley. Set in Switzerland in 1995, the film portrays Highsmith as a bitter drunk, not keen to write another book in her twilight years. Alden Ehrenreich plays a literary editor who travels from New York to convince her to start writing again. It’s not easy, but he eventually helps her finish the last Ripley novel. As they hash out the details of this plot of a murder, Ehrenreich takes the form of an imagined Tom Ripley, sliding into the gaze of his latest victim, played by Olivia Cooke. Highsmith knows little about this young man and begins to associate him more with her devilish literary character. Her obsession with the depths of murder also starts to rub off on this young man, who may not be everything he says he is.

This movie simply doesn’t know where it wants to go with any of it. I thought it would be a chamber piece, considering it’s based on a play and sets itself up for a verbal battle between Mirren and Ehrenreich. I probably would’ve loved the film more if it had stayed that way, given the rousing debates on art I witnessed earlier this year in The Christophers. But then the film shifts, with the Tom Ripley character looking dapper as he speaks with wit and makes passionate love to Cooke, concocting a story that isn’t as intriguing as the two writers seem to think it is.

The questioning between fact and fiction isn’t all that engaging either, as the film dabs in fanfiction while tinkering with an author’s legacy. Contrary to what purists may bemoan about such a picture, I care little for what was altered about the author’s mindset leading up to her death. What matters more is what warrants such artistic liberties, and it’s frustrating that this picture is more content to deceive than Ripley. The details of murder are not as impressive as the motives behind them, and for a film about a writer, the theatrics seem to take more precedence over the text. And while there are some fine performances, they’re underutilized in a film that can’t decide what it wants to say about writing, murder, fame, or fabrication.

A Talent for Murder has the talent but lacks a clear path, with a scattershot approach to psychological storytelling and manipulation. It is a wildly uneven thriller that darts between Alden Ehrenreich, galavanting as a duplicitous figure, and Helen Mirren, sidelined as a drunk peanut gallery for her own story. It has a simmering atmosphere of dread and some nice dialogue exchanges here and there, but it never feels like the film decided what it wanted to be, coming off more like a sloppy fanfiction of Magpie Murders typed out between guzzles of wine. Maybe it reads better with a pour, because it doesn’t hold together well when you look at it sober.