A thinking person's horror movie!

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2004)

An FBI operative seeks the help of a convicted serial killer in the search for one still active.
This film features some very good acting. Not great acting, mind you, because the roles don't involve evolving before our eyes. The characters have evolved before they hit the screen.
Thomas Harris is one of the cleverest novelists around. He is both a good writer and a clever writer: Plenty of good writers write novels about subjects that don't engage the general public, but are well written and deserve to be read. They write for a small audience and, if they are lucky, sales keep the author fed, sheltered and clothed until the next one comes out.
However Harris is also a clever writer in that he chooses the material of cheap thrillers (serial killers - zero points for originality!) and writes about them with the care and attention that is normally reserved for our friends in the former paragraph. The subject is taking him to the top of the ladder - not his care with words.
There is something slightly bizarre a-foot here. This is a film based on cheap thrills and tension, which I could live with if the reviewers (of all colours) weren't so precious about it all.
This film takes a lot of time and trouble over minor details and yet major plot lines are clearly S-T-U-P-I-D. Actors sit in on FBI lessons to learn technique and procedure then Agent Starling goes and visits Lector ON HER OWN!
(Yes isn't it amazing how quickly common-sense - no matter the FBI rule book - is thrown away when it gets in the way of an easy tension device!)
There is a lot right with this film and a lot wrong with it too. Thrillers have no other role other than thrill and thrill it does, but I hate the authors coded references that only he and a few PhDs/crime authors can understand. Private jokes are snobbery.
(I am glad that IMDb have a trivia section for this movie it answered a lot of my questions. With Harris every "stray" phrase has a story behind it.)
Killer Lector is a bit like Huggy Bear in Starsky and Hutch. He knows everything about everything and it is a shame he is not the policeman because all serious crime would be solved in five minutes! Yes we have to have some device for throwing these people together (however silly), but how does he know all this info from his well guarded cell. Is he on some private "serial killer" bulletin board?
("Hey guys - that woman that was sliced up in to six pieces in Houston -- that was me....")
A lot of people got a lot of enjoyment from this film and I thought it was quite good too, but it is also slightly sick. The subject matter is worthy of our attention, but I am uneasy about it being served up as "great art" and given Oscars.
This about as much "great art" as the musical Grease. Take away the horror movie stunts (or film them in a more benign way) and it would have flopped at the box office.
Also to be noted is that this is a "strong woman" picture - if Agent Starling was a man most women would have marked it a point or two lower than they have. I hope that isn't read as a sexist observation.