The Alchemical Transformation of Tom Ripley
CALCINATION: The Burning Away of Tom Ripley
Steven Zaillian's Ripley opens with Tom trapped in New York's subway, drowning in a nightmare that becomes literal in Italy. The eight-episode series adapts Patricia Highsmith's novel, allowing Tom's metamorphosis the time it needs on screen. He starts as a mail fraud artist barely afloat, and Mr Greenleaf's proposition sparks something dangerous. The black-and-white cinematography eliminates distraction, focusing us on Andrew Scott's face as Tom Ripley registers the first spark of possibility. That passport session is more than bureaucracy; Tom is already imagining himself as someone else. The narrative understands that transformation requires destruction—Tom's failed life must burn away to make room for something new.
DISSOLUTION: Drowning in Dickie's World
Atrani, where Dickie lives, hits like a drug. After New York's darkness, Tom dissolves into Mediterranean light, though Zaillian keeps it monochrome. Johnny Flynn's Dickie lives with such ease that watching Tom try to match his rhythm is uncomfortable. The swimming scenes are excruciating—Tom can't swim, can barely stay afloat, yet must feign confidence. Scott performs multiple Toms: sophisticated for Marge, rebellious for Dickie, grateful for Mr Greenleaf. Each performance dissolves the last until we, like Tom, lose track of who he is. The series luxuriates in this dissolution, letting us sit in Tom's discomfort and desire. By episode three, his boundaries have liquefied—he studies Dickie's signatures, wears Dickie's clothes alone, and practices his laugh in the mirror.
SEPARATION: The Boat and the Oar
The San Remo boat scene arrives with horrible inevitability. Dickie's casual cruelty—"just Marge and I for Christmas"—lands like a slap because we've spent three episodes watching Tom pour himself into this friendship. The murder isn't sudden violence but calculated separation. Three blows with the oar, each one deliberate, each one severing another connection to Tom's former self. Zaillian shoots it with terrible beauty: blood spreading across water, the boat rocking with each impact, Dickie's surprise giving way to understanding. What makes this scene devastating isn't the violence but Tom's face afterwards—Scott shows us someone discovering what they're capable of. The body goes overboard, but Tom keeps everything else: the rings, the clothes, the identity. He's separated Dickie from his life, and now that life is available for the taking.
CONJUNCTION: Becoming Dickie Greenleaf
Episodes four and five show Tom performing a kind of identity surgery on himself. The train bathroom transformation scene is choreographed like a religious ritual—clothes changed, hair adjusted, posture shifted. In Rome, Tom doesn't just impersonate Dickie; he inhabits him with uncanny precision. The signature practice scenes are mesmerising: pages and pages of "Dickie Greenleaf" until the forgery becomes more real than the original. But a conjunction creates complications. When Freddie Miles arrives, played with perfect obnoxious energy by Eliot Sumner, the performance cracks. Freddie sees something wrong—not quite Tom, not quite Dickie, but something monstrous in between. The Murano glass ashtray murder is even more brutal than the boat scene because now Tom kills to preserve his creation. He's protecting his new identity like an artist protecting their masterpiece.
FERMENTATION: Everything Rots in Palermo
The series’s middle episodes let Tom's situation properly ferment—something most adaptations rush through. The police investigation tightens like a noose while Tom shuttles between identities, each one decomposing. Inspector Ravini, played with dogged intelligence by Maurizio Lombardi, keeps appearing at the worst moments. Tom flees to Palermo, and Zaillian makes us feel the decay: shabby hotels, sweating through cheap sheets, newspapers announcing "Tom Ripley feared dead." This is where the eight-episode structure pays off brilliantly—we need to see Tom stew in this impossible situation, watch both identities rot while something new bubbles up from the decomposition. The ferry to Palermo becomes a River Styx crossing, Tom suspended between lives, between selves, letting the old versions of both Tom and Dickie putrefy in the Sicilian heat.
DISTILLATION: The Essential Tom
Venice arrives like a revelation. After the squalor of Palermo, Tom distils himself into something pure and strange. He returns as Tom Ripley, but transformed—he's absorbed Dickie's confidence, his ease with wealth, his aesthetic sensibility. The palazzo apartment he secures is perfect: isolated, beautiful, filled with art and silence. Zaillian's Venice is a city of mirrors and marble, every surface reflecting Tom's refined performance. His final meeting with Ravini becomes a masterclass in controlled truth-telling. Scott plays these scenes with extraordinary precision—Tom admits just enough truth to make his lies unassailable. He's boiled away the desperation, the obvious performance, the crude violence, leaving only essence: a Tom Ripley who was always meant to live in Dickie Greenleaf's world. Marge's arrival threatens everything, but even she can't penetrate this distilled version of Tom.
COAGULATION: The Philosopher's Stone of Identity
The final episode remains quietly unsettling: Tom wins completely. The Caravaggio book he contemplates throughout the episode is not merely set dressing—Zaillian draws a parallel between artists who were also killers. Caravaggio murdered a man and spent his life fleeing, creating beauty from violence. Tom achieves a similar feat: transforming murder into art, a nobody into a somebody, absence into presence. When Mr Greenleaf accepts Tom's narrative, when Dickie's money becomes his, and as he sits alone in his Venetian palazzo surrounded by beautiful objects, the transformation feels fully realised. The black-and-white photography now reveals its purpose—it is not nostalgic but essential, stripping away everything except truth and performance, showing that for Tom, they have become indistinguishable. Andrew Scott's final scenes radiate contentment. Tom Ripley gets away with it—not just legally but existentially. He has become precisely who he pretended to be, simultaneously no one and everyone. The series concludes with Tom alone yet untroubled, successful but never truly satisfied, real without being authentic—a perfect paradox, a living artwork fashioned from blood and deception.
Andrew Higgs is getting his new book, The Alchemy of Screen Acting: Building a Sustainable Career in 21 Steps, ready for publication. Subscribers to Substack receive practical insights on screen acting and career development, and will be the first to know when the book becomes available. Subscribe for free using the link above.