Three glamorous ruins in sun-drenched Greece

THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY

Monday, BBC Two, 10pm

For his 2014 directorial debut, acclaimed British-Iranian scriptwriter Hossein Amini turned to Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel about a deadly ménage à trois which develops between two American newly-weds touring Europe – Colette MacFarland (Kirsten Dunst) and her much older husband Chester (Viggo Mortensen) – and smooth-talking young Yale man, Rydal Keener (Oscar Isaac).

The year is 1962, the place Athens. The trio meets by chance at the Acropolis, where the polyglot Rydal is leading a group of flirty female students around the ruins.

Chester reminds Rydal of his recently deceased father – we see him reading a letter admonishing him for not returning for the funeral, so it’s a recollection tinged with guilt – and as the three of them eye each other from adjacent café tables there is clearly a low-level attraction between Rydal and Colette.

A casual conversation leads to a friendly invitation to dinner, dinner turns into an ouzo-fuelled bender in which various confidences are exchanged, and when Rydal returns late to the MacFarlands’ hotel to deliver a bracelet Colette has dropped, he finds Chester in the corridor dragging something which could be a corpse – or just a drunk American Chester met in the bar, which is the story he offers and which Rydal prefers.

Still, he starts to think his suave and handsome acquaintances, who until now have seemed like something out of an F Scott Fitzgerald novel, have one or two sordid secrets they don’t wish to share.

Thankfully Greek-speaking Rydal is no stranger to casual dishonesty – he cheerfully fleeces his café date and then, when they visit a flea market together, the MacFarlands – and he just happens to have a useful local contact who’s in the passport forging business, which is handy as the MacFarlands have left theirs at the hotel in their rush to leave.

And so the three of them take a boat to Crete to wait for the arrival of the documents. As they wait, jealousy, suspicion and sexual tension pool together into a combustible mixture.

There’s a Hitchcockian feel to it all – unsurprising, really: Hitchcock was an early admirer of Highsmith and filmed her first novel, Strangers On A Train, a year after it was published – and fans of Anthony Minghella’s 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr Ripley will find much to enjoy here too, from the costumes to the locations to the flaky amorality of the three leads.

Despite the best efforts of its stellar cast, Amini’s film can’t match Minghella’s for twists and atmosphere, but it’s still a moody slow-burn treat.