The only Emmy that matters

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Ripley made me gasp. Netflix’s adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr Ripley is a wonder of black-and-white gorgeousness, and while leading man Andrew Scott may not have had anywhere near as much fun playing Tom Ridley as Matt Damon and the impossibly gorgeous Alain Delon before him, cinematographer Robert Elswit makes up for it with dazzling camerawork somehow reminiscent of both Caravaggio and Hitchcock — at the same time.

There’s Ripley, skulking through an Italian villa that’s more mausoleum than home. The light barely pierces the dimness, casting long, sharp shadows across the walls as if the very architecture is haunted by moral decay. Here, Ripley stands—half his face in blinding light, the other submerged in total darkness, a split identity visualised in real-time.

Could a metaphor be any more unsubtle, yet so perfectly pitched? This is Robert Elswit — the master who won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood — taking Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique and deploying it for old-school noir style. An exquisite use of hard, natural light, light that cuts, that separates, that isolates. This isn’t just visual flair; it’s the storytelling engine.

The textures, the composition, the play of light and darkness—it’s all so deliberate, so achingly beautiful that even a sociopath like Ripley seems like an innocent caught in the web of Italy’s Baroque grandeur. Ripley, unsurprisingly, won an award for Outstanding Cinematography at this year’s Emmy Awards, which, for me, may have been the one award that mattered this year. The rest has been fraud.