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37 Ripley Shots That Would Blow Caravaggio’s Mind
The black-and-white Netflix series relies on visual motifs that reflect its central character’s alienation. It absolutely rips.
With a chilly, textured black-and-white palette for the boot-shaped country in which con man Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) reinvents himself, Netflix’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation becomes one of the most conceptual, visually uncompromising TV shows of the year. Longtime collaborators Zaillian and cinematographer Robert Elswit engage the eye with reflections, shadows, and patterns, push the limits of the frame with ultrawide compositions and dueling foreground and background images, and go to bat for the discomfiting power of negative space. The labyrinthine caves of steps he climbs in Atrani to find Dickie isn’t as starkly angular as the apartment staircase he later encounters, but the general idea of Tom needing to move through these spaces to literally and figuratively end up where he wants to be holds, his desire for upward mobility physically rendered over and over Ripley ’s eight episodes.
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