In this film, Chester McFarland and his wife Colette arrived in Athens for sightseeing. At that time, the couple encounters a new encounter with Rydal, a young Greek-speaking American who acts as a tour guide. In the meantime, everyone tries to force Rydal afterwards to help Chester hide the body of the mabahith, which will turn things upside down.
Rather than rise, this story cools off, fading away into unconvincing, accidental tragedy and an attempted emotional coda that feels more stapled on than woven in.
It's a classy looking movie for sure, and as pleasant a travelogue as Ripley was in its day. But Highsmith's psychological edge is absent for much of this and its shade of noir has suffered a serious bleaching in all that Mediterranean sun.
At a certain point, it's akin to reading a mediocre murder mystery. You finish it because you're too far in to quit, as opposed to actually caring how things wrap up.
This is a well-written and well-acted movie. The relationships in the triangle at the center of the film are not easily made convincing, but excellent acting makes it work. This is a very solid thriller with a lot of compelling emotional complexity.
Everything about The Two Faces of January is right, even as the events it describes - a couple's idyllic Grecian holiday, a charming American's adventures abroad - go terribly wrong.
Despite admirable moment-to-moment feats of actorly legerdemain from the primary and secondary cast alike, there's a deadly lack of heat. The costumes sing, the cigarettes fume. The simmer satisfies but never earns the tale's godless gloom.
[Hossein Amini's] polished storytelling carries this along, generally compensating for the mundane visuals and the actors' skilled but unmoored performances.
