Ripley's Game

Ripley's Game (2002) is a British-Italian-American crime thriller directed by Liliana Cavani — stream it online on iFILM. John Malkovich plays Tom Ripley, now settled into a villa in the Veneto, married, cultivated, and apparently retired from his more murderous habits.

A business contact from Berlin's underworld needs someone killed. Ripley doesn't do it himself — he designs the situation. His neighbour Jonathan Trevanny, played by Dougray Scott, once slighted him at a party without even realising it. Jonathan also happens to be terminally ill, heavily in debt, and desperate to leave something for his wife and son. Ripley slots him neatly into the plan: one quiet man, one impossible offer, and a sequence of killings that spirals far beyond what either of them expected. Ray Winstone rounds out the cast as the Berlin contact who keeps raising the stakes.

Where Matt Damon's Ripley was driven by hunger for belonging, Malkovich's version is something colder — a man who engineers other people's falls with the detached patience of a chess player. That quality makes the film far more unsettling than its pulp setup would suggest. Watch Ripley's Game (2002) online on iFILM.