Ripley on Netflix: Andrew Scott is menacing and mesmerizing.

This post contains spoilers for Ripley. In an uncharacteristic moment of vehemence in the series, Ripley dismisses a friend of Dickie’s as “such a fraud,” a rich dilettante merely posing as a playwright. Even after Dickie catches Ripley in his room, dressed in Dickie’s clothes, acting out a scene of rejecting Marge in Dickie’s voice, he doesn’t throw Ripley out. The series lingers over the steps Ripley must take to assume Dickie’s identity and fortune, and to elude a persistent but not-too-clever police detective. Highsmith describes him leaving the scene of Dickie’s murder by train, savoring the accommodations in his first-class berth and enjoying “an ecstatic moment when he thought of all the pleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables, seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure.” He goes to sleep, “happy, content, and utterly confident, as he had never been before in his life.” Zaillian’s Ripley is much less transparent.