The Divisive Silence of the Lambs Sequel That’s Still Not as Weird as the Book

The Silence of the Lambs is one of the great thrillers in Hollywood history. Based on the novel by Thomas Harris, Jonathan Demme’s horror procedural reinvented the serial murderer narrative with a gothic edge, a pioneering heroine, and one of the great villains in the form of Hannibal Lecter. It remains a rare horror film to have won the Best Picture Oscar, and the figure of Hannibal the Cannibal continues to loom over the genre over 30 years later. A sequel was inevitable, and the one we got was odd, but it was nowhere near as strange as the book it was based on.

Harris reportedly never wanted to write a sequel, but when mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis, who owned the film rights to the Lecter character but didn't work on The Silence of the Lambs, wanted a sequel, Harris provided one. The end result, which ended up being the second biggest selling novel of 1999 (beaten only by John Grisham), is genuinely bananas.

In it, we see Lecter living as a free man under a fake name in Florence, while Clarice Starling is tasked with apprehending him after a major career blender. Watching over all of this is Mason Verger, a millionaire pedophile with a sadistic streak who literally drinks the tears of children and is now a quadriplegic with a sliced-up face thanks to Hannibal’s meddling and a bottle of poppers. He wants revenge on Lecter and works with a crooked Justice Department official, Paul Krendler, to make it happen. Also involved is Margot, Mason's abused sister, who is a lesbian bodybuilder hoping to get some of Mason's sperm so she can impregnate her partner and inherit the Verger fortune.

Things only get weirder after that: Margot gets Mason’s sperm via cattle prod electrocution, Hannibal brainwashes Clarice into being in love with him (and digs up her father's skeleton for the process). Krendler eats his own brain. Clarice breastfeeds Hannibal. There are murderous pigs. An electric eel becomes a murder weapon.

Readers were left flabbergasted. While Stephen King loved Hannibal, most critics thought Harris had descended into melodrama and shock tactics, with the novel lacking the eloquence and true unease of its predecessors. But hey, it was a commercial hit, and the De Laurentiis Company wanted their movie. Jonathan Demme turned it down as he found the material to be too lurid. Instead, Ridley Scott was hired, having been intrigued by the book while filming Gladiator. Still, he wanted some changes, especially with the ending, so Harris gave him permission to undo the Clarice/Hannibal brainwash skeleton love story (a smart move.)

This time around, Julianne Moore plays Clarice as a seasoned FBI agent who has become disenfranchised with the cycle of bureaucracy and corruption that has tainted the job she loves. Anthony Hopkins returns to the role that won him his first Oscar, and he’s embraced the ham as a free man. In Florence, he is a proud showboating socialite who turns the tables on a detective hired to hunt him down. It’s these scenes where the film is at its best: beautifully shot in a scenic locale, with Scott and cinematographer John Mathison indulging in a shadowy gothic style befitting of the book.

The rest of the film, however, struggles to deal with its weird source material, whether it remains faithful to it or runs in the opposite direction (Hannibal’s backstory involving the murder of his sister is entirely omitted.) Even on the page, Mason Verger is too much, but on screen, as played by an uncredited Gary Oldman, he's an uneasy mixture of despicable and laughable. There’s none of the real menace of The Silence of the Lambs, nor that film’s elegant plotting. It would have made sense to aim for pulp, but Scott wants Hannibal to embody prestige, and the disconnect simply falls flat. Mercifully, the movie doesn’t pair off Hannibal and Clarice in a Stockholm Syndrome happy-ever-after, and there’s a case to be made that the film’s ending is more thematically cohesive for the characters. Still, it’s too little too late.

We would eventually get an adaptation that kept most of the bananas elements from the book in the third season of Hannibal, NBC and Bryan Fuller’s baroque and feverish take on the Lecter mythos. Changes were made to update some of the elements that aged poorly, most notably the character of Margot, but it’s striking how much of the novel was okayed for a network drama.

One wonders if a faithful film adaptation of Hannibal would have worked had Scott embraced the crass gonzo nightmare of Harris’s book and let his imagination run wild. How would audiences in 2001 have felt about something so unashamedly deviant and grotesque? Would it even have made it into cinemas with an R rating over an NC-17? It’s certainly fun to imagine this version of the film, if only because the one we got is at its best when it’s as lascivious as the book. When it’s trying to be anything other than Harris’s novel, it feels dishearteningly toothless. At least give Dr. Lecter something satisfying to chew on.

Hannibal is available to rent on all digital platforms.