It’s difficult to know where to begin with such a revered and elusive writer as Patricia Highsmith whose novels Ripley’s Game, Strangers On A Train and Carol were adapted into films by Wim Wenders, Alfred Hitchcock and Todd Haynes. In this documentary, Swiss director Eva Vitija takes the angle of her love life to shade in the author’s identity and get to grips with how that informed her writing. In doing so, the film also skims over her antisemitism and prejudices; the only mention being a brisk clip that suggests this all came later on in life. 

Interviews with Highsmith’s lovers (the amusingly candid writer Marijane Meaker, teacher Monique Buffet, and German actor-director Tabea Blumenschein) are documentary’s highlights, as they discuss wild nights out featuring animated discussions and archive photos bringing to life the Parisian, Berlin and New York lesbian-bar scenes. In between all that, Highsmith’s Texas-based family chip in with stories about a tense relationship with her mother. Gwendoline Christie provides the author’s voice reading out snippets of Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941–1995, with breathy, alluring narration.

Vitija chooses intriguing clips from the aforementioned films and pairs them with Highsmith’s personal diary entries, and passages from her books to craft an ambience of longing and desperation for love. It’s a documentary that very much wants to illustrate the author’s psyche but it does so through a mostly uncritical perspective. Unlike Patricia Highsmith’s novels, it doesn’t lean enough into the darker side of human nature and that is its failing. 

Loving Highsmith in in cinemas now.