Netflix’s Ripley Refreshes Cinema with its Black and White Storytelling

Note: This review is spoiler free.

If you’re like me and an oft viewer of streaming services (particularly Netflix), you’ll already know that last week, Netflix’s Ripley debuted on the streaming platform. The show is particularly divisive on Twitter with a lot of people comparing the show with its predecessors: Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel and the 1999 film starring Matt Damon, Gwenyth Paltrow, Jude Law, Cate Blanchett, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Ripley stars Andrew Scott (from Fleabag and BBC’s Sherlock), Dakota Fanning, Johnny Flynn, Eliot Sumner, Margherita Buy, and Maurizio Lombardi. The entire series is shot in black and white, with colour emerging solely through dialogue descriptions, making the miniseries particularly stylistic and emulating auteurs from the early and mid-twentieth century, like Alfred Hitchcock and the noir film genre, as well as Gothic elements that emerge with the series’ homage to the Italian painter, Caravaggio.

However, the decision to shoot the miniseries in black and white is not only stylistic, but symbolic as well. In the Daily Beast’s review for the show, Nick Schager hails the series’ cinematography as “classically beautiful and coolly menacing [as it] reflects the inherently bifurcated nature of [Steven Zaillian’s] protagonist,” which I take a step further in my own analysis of the show and believe it also plays into the symbolism of black and white nature of Ripley’s own perspective of life and survival.

Throughout the series, Scott is phenomenal in his role as Tom Ripley, tinging the homoerotic undercurrents with violence and avarice of Richard/Dickie Greenleaf’s life. Not only is Ripley an aesthetic monument and masterclass in renewing older film techniques for a more contemporary age, the series is ripe with imagery and symbolism that reflect Tom’s own desires.

Each actor in their own role brings something unique to the series with their portrayal and takes on these already iconic roles, particularly Eliot Sumner who, despite the unfair social media criticism of their portrayal of Freddie Miles, is deliberately grating and oppressive in a show that very clearly is shot in Tom’s own perspective.

At only eight episodes, Ripley is a thrilling investment that will keep you on the edge of your seat right until the last second.

Ripley is now streaming on Netflix.