Patricia Highsmith’s charming devil has fascinated film-makers since the 1960s, but his brand of evil seems peculiarly well suited to the Instagram age

He’s back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith’s diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud. He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian’s sumptuous and instantly addictive new eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer. It’s a seven-star luxury hotel of a TV show in arthouse black-and-white, which my colleague Lucy Mangan has hailed as quite possibly definitive.

It’s set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott’s Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability,...