It starts with the story. That’s where the quality comes from. Without Patricia Highsmith’s novels, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley’s Game and three others, the new limited series from Netflix and director Steven Zaillian couldn’t exist. I know that’s true of every film. All of them come from the story. But a lot of films—especially period pieces, and Ripley is most definitely a period piece—spend so much time getting the look right and setting a tone that they forget the two things that make a movie great: the story and the acting.

But let’s talk about the story first.

Because Patricia Highsmith was a piece of work. She was a New York writer who hit during the peak of film noir. Highsmith was a wreck. I say this not having read the excellent biographies about Highsmith. I say this after getting my information from Wikipedia and shards of bullshit swept up out from under the dimly lit curtains of the internet so do your own research. She was a Texas born lesbian daughter of crazy artists who came of age in the late 40s and early 50s so fill in the Mommy Dearest/Dark Mrs. Mazel panels of her comic book origin story for yourself.

Ripley is her best known work

But perhaps not her critical best. That should be awarded to The Price of Salt, her lesbian love story published under a pseudonym in 1952. She wrote during the height of the mid-century American renaissance. Yeah, it was awful. I took civics. But while the landscape was in no way level, there was still an explosion of incredible art, literature, film and oh man, the music. This was the era of classic jazz and the cinematic ballads your grandmother lost her virginity to. Listen to Julie London singing “Cry me River,” or Elmer Bernstein’s classic “Frankie Machine.” Check out Jack Kerouac narrating “October in the Railroad Earth” on the Steve Allen show with Steve Allen on piano. Put on “Caper at the Coffee House,” by the Warren Barker Orchestra for the love of God. This is the atmosphere of the New York 50s for a bookish girl who loved rich bookish girls. Dark, sharp, stark; luxuriously detailed, frantic with beauty, edged with danger. This is the headspace from which the Ripliad. the five books featuring her enduring queer icon, Tom Ripley, emerged.

In Ripley, Highsmith tuned the emotion to the…antagonist?

Is Ripley the protagonist or the antagonist? The quick answer is a dismissive upward swoop of one’s eyebrows with enough force to dislodge one’s wig. To deliver the longer answer properly, you need to take a moment after some dimwitted badger fucker asks this question at a party, adjust your ascot, light a Pall Mall, take a drag then look at them with a smoky squint and ask them if they’ve never heard of an anti-hero. Because fuuuuuuuck Ripley is the definition.

Author Alison Bechtel said this beautiful thing about Highsmith: “The amazing thing to me about Highsmith’s books is how intensely she forces you to identify with her protagonist. I feel capable of murder when I’m reading a Ripley book.”

This is partly why her novels have endured and thrived. It must have been weird for most the American readership, the straight book buyers, to empathize with a queer, psychopathic, murderous criminal. But the really squeaky thing is not that people merely empathize with Ripley. It’s that the reader finds herself cheering along as he steals, cheats, deceives, and murder kills his way toward his goal which is…well, it’s hard to say. Being rich? That may be Ripley’s endgame. But his craft is deception for deception’s sake and from the moment we meet him, we’re dialed all the way in, aiding and abetting him at every turn. Which brings us to the acting.

Andrew Scott is a sinister mastermind

I mean to say, he becomes one in the character of Ripley. His acting has never been this good. Scott has proven himself remarkably talented. I saw him first—just like everyone else—as Cowboy in Band of Brothers. Dude worked constantly after that but it was probably in Sherlock that people really recognized him. Then came Fleabag and every time someone mentioned the new actor playing a hot priest those of use who knew him would shout back IT’S NOT HIS FIRST WORK, IDIOT!

But it was in Sherlock that we got a taste of Scott’s faculty for radiating menace. Sherlock was comedic, so Scott‘s take on Moriarty was way, way, way over the top, but it’s how he embraced going over the top with such reckless joy that held your attention. Scott was all in. He reveled in his character’s crazy town evil lunacy. Hell, he upstaged Benjamin Cumbersnatch with one hand tied behind his back.

But in Ripley, Scott exceeds himself by a million miles

Unlike his turn as Moriarty, Scott acts Ripley with small gestures. Glances. He packs narrative power into motionless staring. And where Scott is a mastermind, Ripley isn’t. He’s no criminal genius. He’s crafty. He’s like a pickpocket who collects coupons. And the myriad ways Scott tells this story are spellbinding. When he makes a call on a payphone (look it up, kids) he checks the coin return even though he made the call himself. It’s a force of habit. He’s a cheapskate and an opportunist and where there may have been a million ways to show it, this tiny choice revealed that trait and embedded it into our map of Ripley with perfect precision so when he runs into an actual opportunity, we watch him coming to the slow realization by degrees while on the edge of our seats.

This is a director thing, of course.

Zaillian is a goddam wizard. Until this week, I would have told you the pinnacle of his body of work was Schindler’s List, a movie that’s so good it takes a whole dictionary of superlatives to describe it right. But now, Schindler falls to number two. In the first 15 minutes of the first episode Zaillian establishes that this is fucking noir. And fair warning, if you are a noir freak like me, you’re going to wear out your rewind button and wake up your neighbors because you will be shouting FUCK YES an awful lot. Every shot—and I mean every, single, fucking shot—is an immaculate frame re-illustrating the noir shot book. You may have previously looked to Kiss Me Deadly or Man with a Movie Camera for your Dutch Angle perfection but you won’t any more. Now it’s Ripley. You used to think of The Third Man when you thought of stark contrast, deep shadows, and slow burn menace (but not for soundtracks, jesus). Now it’s Ripley.

Now it’s Ripley.

I love a good period piece. I adore verisimilitude. My cosmology is hardcore simulacrum-multiverse-whack-a-do-cosmic-absurdity and when someone recreates another time with deep, nerdish precision I get chub. Go watch Barry Lyndon. Follow Tom Hardy as he incests his way through 18th century London in Taboo. Dig Matthew MacFadyen in Ripper Street. But those shows, good as they are, rely on CGI and green screening to achieve their fidelity. Not Zaillian. He went to Italy where the damn story takes place and shot the scenes on site. Atrani, Capri, Naples, Rome, Palermo. These are the white slacks, dark sunglasses Cote d’Or destinations of the Cary Grant years. From a distance, the crooked streets and white washed walls are romantic as hell, but when you step off the bus, it’s all uphill. Those stairs Zaillian shoots as Ripley ascends to the villa on the cliff are real. In fact, you’ve seen them before since they are the same stairs Clive Owens climbs in Monsieur Spade. Is this a metaphor for Ripley? That the whole shebang is cool on the surface but rotten underneath? That Ripley’s brief moments of suave are a facade? That Ripley is realer than Sam Spade? I mean, Owens got sick of those steps, too.

But Andrew Scott does it better.

This is the genius of his acting skills. This is how you get sucked into adoration for a killer. He suffers. He’s been suffering the entire film, even after getting such a windfall through Dickie’s dad. It’s a dream come true—tickets to Italy, spending money, room and board, and a salary. Sign me up. But it takes a few seconds for Ripley to comprehend that he’s getting what he’s always wanted handed to him because, as Scott’s acting informs us, Ripley is a loser.

As a criminal, he’s good enough. He’s not Moriarty. It’s how Highsmith, Zaillian, and Scott get us to trust him; it’s how we sympathize and empathize. He fucks up. He loses. He fails at floating a check, and though it’s a gas to watch him realize he’s getting caught then power through it, he still loses a week’s unearned pay. In Italy, he gets taken immediately in the most common train station swindle when he’s turned into a cab that takes him the longest way to a bus station.

However, Ripley grows. Or I assume he grows. I had to stop after the first episode because I was out of whiskey and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna watch the best film noir in sixty years without a fistful of expensive bourbon to keep me company. But he must; of course he does because Scott shows it. In Italy he endeavors to learn the language and he makes the tiniest progress, word by word. In the dilapidated post office, so indicative of his new environment and true station, when the postmaster insists “Porta! Porta!,”—Close the door! Close the door!—it’s another detail, another miniscule element, an atomic phoneme in Scott’s searing vocabulary that tells. It informs. It inveigles its way into your subconscious so that you begin in that moment to mold a little nugget of hope for Ripley. It’s in Scott’s beautiful and astonishing collection of such tiny moments that you bond with him. He’s an awkward, hopelessly polite, secretly snarky, and a ceaselessly opportunistic ruthless killer. And you will love him.