Story

A young American guy leaves for Italy with the task to convince a rich sluggard to go back to his father. But it will insinuate more and more with the deception in the brilliant life of the sprig and his girlfriend up to wanting to take his place.

From the novel of Patricia Highsmith, the film tells the story of Tom Ripley, a young American guy without any money, sent to Italy by a rich entrepeneur to take back home his libertine son, Dickie, of whom he steals the identity after murdering him during a fight. Ripley moves to Rome, but, unmasked by a friend of Dickie, he is forced to kill him, telling even more lies than he has already told. But Ripley plays the game very well and he can make it to reconstruct a false suicide of Dickie with a testament in his favor. The danger now seems to be gone (it “sails” to a new life!), when, for a chain of not much believable coincidences (these Americans in vacation seem to be everywhere), everything seems to fall through. And it’s at this point that Ripley has to accomplish the final gesture, going back and kill another person that is going to discover what he did. But this time it concerns a person that he appreciates, that has no guilt, for who he feels something very intense, with whom he desired to rely on. This action is not a sin you can just buy off for him, an auto-censure to loneliness and isolation. The last scenes show him exactly this way: thoughtful, obscure, closed in a dark and lonely dimension and remembering a horrible action.