Just before Christmas in 2023, Alden Ehrenreich spent a week in an L.A. hotel room with Helen Mirren and director Anton Corbijn, painstakingly rehearsing the film about novelist Patricia Highsmith they were about to start. A Talent for Murder was being adapted from a play, with Mirren set to portray the notoriously difficult author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ehrenreich as the junior editor dispatched by his publishing house to persuade her to write another novel in the series. Then, just before production, the project fell apart because of financing and scheduling.

“It took over a year to make it happen again, and by the time we dusted off our scripts, we realized that no one took notes, especially about all the blocking,” Ehrenreich says with a laugh. “We had a single day to figure it all out, so we did it in a total fugue state.”

A bit of disorientation, it turns out, is just what the movie called for.…