A Perfect Thriller

Rating: 9/10 (6 September 2019)

The horror genre has constantly gotten a bad rep over the years for being nothing but mindless gore, shocks, and popcorn entertainment. Even still, there have been many horror films that have managed to leak their way into the mainstream and capture the imaginations and hearts of a wide audience. The Silence of the Lambs proves that you don't need buckets of blood or a shock a minute to tell a thoughtful, unnerving, and unforgettable horror story.
Clarice Starling is an up and coming FBI agent who gets the opportunity of a lifetime - probing the mind of the deranged (but oddly charming) Hannibal Lector - a cannibal. Clarice needs information about a recently captured girl who she fears might be the next victim of an even more damaged psychopath who wants to wear her skin. Clarice and Hannibal end up working together to find him, but will Clarice be too late?
The trick of Silence of the Lambs is that it spends as much time with character development as it does with the action, thrills, and horror. We get to know Clarice and Hannibal over the course of the film and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins have never been better (hence their well-deserved Oscar wins).
It also helps that every frame of the film feels real. Even small cameo roles are drenched in a quirky realism. We feel like we know or have seen people like this. The locations all feel like places we've encountered before. All this adds up to make the film way scarier than it has the right to be. There aren't any major jump scares in the film, but due to its realism and attention to every day detail, the film becomes all the more terrifying, because it's a world we recognize and we know we could very well be the next victim.