Last year I went to Florence (via the Orient Express no less) - the cover story was our 30th Wedding Anniversary but for me one ‘must’ was to visit the location of a particularly memorable scene from one of my favourite films, which sounds reassuringly cultured until you discover that the scene involves a policeman being disembowelled and thrown from a balcony.
Ridley Scott’s Hannibal has that effect on a person. You start appreciating the architecture, then find yourself looking up at Palazzo Vecchio, overlooking Piazza della Signoria, thinking about Anthony Hopkins offering Giancarlo Giannini a choice that definitely wasn’t included in the tourist information. “Bowels in or bowels out?” is an unusual basis for a pilgrimage, admittedly, but Darkmatters has never promised to improve anyone’s holiday planning.
Rewatching it, I’m reminded how completely I love this film. The Florence passages, the music, Hopkins enjoying the doctor’s freedom, the horrible jokes, the sheer nerve of that dinner scene: there is an extravagant confidence to it that gets me every time… Here’s my review after this Halloween season’s rewatch:
Hannibal (2001)
Not as loved or respected by the majority as The Silence of the Lambs (unjustly in my opinion) Hannibal is a lavish, grandiose spectacle of horror cinema…
Unapologetically embracing the macabre schlock of the novel and revelling in its own twisted beauty. This is one of the most operatic, engaging visual feasts to grace the screen. For me it is as luxurious as it is grotesque, creating a world where every frame feels like a painting, dripping with both elegance and menace. This is horror that doesn’t hold back; it’s bold, it’s gruesome, and it’s deliciously over the top.
It is also one of the reasons I went to Florence. Ridley ‘Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator’ Scott takes a character whose previous film appearance had turned confinement into a source of power and gives him room to indulge himself. Hopkins’s Lecter lives as Dr Fell, moving through Florentine cultural life with a confidence that makes his assumed identity seem almost unnecessary. He understands the art, knows the music and can address a scholarly audience without breaking a sweat. Sir Anthony Hopkins returns as Dr. Hannibal Lecter with an irresistible charm that makes the character even more chilling. His performance is both terrifying and magnetic; each line, every look, and whisper is soaked in menace and dark humour. Hopkins turns Lecter into a refined monster, someone so cultured and controlled that you can’t help but be drawn in, even as he commits unspeakable acts.
There is a lovely detail in the production notes: the piano music Hopkins plays at Palazzo Capponi was his own composition, used after Scott heard him playing while the scene was being prepared. The cultural assurance has something real underneath it.
Scott and cinematographer John Mathieson make Florence intensely desirable - eat your heart out Room With A View… You want time to look at the rooms, the stonework and the faces, which means the film begins recruiting you into Lecter’s pleasure in his surroundings. It is easy to dismiss all this as the director enjoying a very attractive location, but the city supplies the film with a history of cultivated power and public violence that suits the doctor perfectly. He can appreciate a beautiful object and understand the cruelty associated with its world without experiencing the slightest need to choose between them. His refinement is real, which makes it much more disturbing than a disguise.
Giancarlo Giannini’s Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi gives the Florence story its accumulating dread. He recognises the opportunity represented by Lecter and allows the possibility of a private reward to compromise his investigation. Giannini makes him sufficiently human that his greed remains recognisable: he wants something better for himself and his wife, and keeps trying to believe he can manage the danger. Unfortunately, he is conducting a transaction with people for whom human lives are just negotiable assets. Every further step makes retreat harder, and Lecter’s courtesy grows more frightening as Pazzi’s confidence deteriorates.
The execution at Palazzo Vecchio is the point where the film’s historical interests and its physical horror come together. Lecter has been discussing betrayal and punishment, and Pazzi finds himself turned into the final illustration. The name connects the fictional detective with the real Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici in 1478, giving his private act of corruption a much older echo. What makes the sequence work is the unhurried preparation: the scholarship, the dawning recognition, the doctor’s practical arrangements and then that appallingly conversational question. Hopkins delivers the choice as though Pazzi has been consulted on a minor matter of presentation. By the time gravity gets involved, Lecter has already staged the entire thing in his head.
The music deserves considerably more attention than a passing mention of a lovely soundtrack. Hans Zimmer wrote the score, but the extraordinary ‘Vide Cor Meum’ was composed by Patrick Cassidy specifically for the film, with text drawn from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Cassidy recalled having less than two weeks to create it. The opera scene was filmed at Santa Croce, with the loggia of the Pazzi Chapel as its backdrop, so even this apparently suspended moment of beauty brings us back to the detective’s name. It gives Lecter an emotional register that Hopkins can inhabit without explaining himself in dialogue.
And the words contain the most deliciously appropriate detail of all. Dante’s vision involves Love holding the poet’s heart and making Beatrice eat it; Cassidy has explicitly discussed that connection to the choice of text. The film’s beautiful musical centre therefore already contains an image of love expressed through eating another person’s heart. You can hear the aria as pure yearning and then discover how precisely it belongs to this particular man. That is the sort of detail that rewards another viewing: Lecter’s romantic imagination is there in the music before the film arrives at its grotesque climax.
Gary Oldman has an outrageously unpleasant time as Mason Verger, the scumbag wealthy abuser whose survival of Lecter’s treatment has left him with an elaborate thirst for revenge. Oldman’s performance brings the man’s entitlement to the fore, expecting money to arrange everything around his desires, including the horrible death of the person he blames for his condition. The voice makes his complaints especially repellent, and Oldman revealed an unlikely influence for it: Katharine Hepburn. Greg Cannom’s prosthetics required roughly five to six hours, including the wig, but it is the fussy, petulant personality underneath them that makes the character so memorable. Hopkins and Oldman had already confronted each other as Van Helsing and Dracula; their reunion here is one for the ages.
Ray ‘Goodfellas’ Liotta’s Paul Krendler supplies another kind of ugliness, using professional power to punish Clarice and advance himself. Between him, Verger and Pazzi, the film surrounds Lecter with people whose recognisable greed and vindictiveness make his victories dangerously satisfying. That is part of its wicked humour. We begin hoping the cannibal will get the better of them, and the film obliges with enough relish to make our allegiance worth questioning. There is nothing morally cleansing about having better taste than the people you kill, however attractive the table setting.
Julianne Moore, stepping into the role of Clarice Starling, is an absolute powerhouse performance. She brings a steely resolve and a complex vulnerability to the character that feels fresh, making Starling her own while still honouring the legacy of Jodie Foster’s portrayal. Moore’s performance is a perfect counterpoint to Hopkins’ sinister charm, and the cat-and-mouse dynamic between them crackles with tension. Watching her navigate the dangers that Lecter sets up, all while facing off against a corrupt system, is a thrill in itself. Moore’s Clarice is central to whether you accept that arrangement. Foster’s absence matters, because her performance in Silence is so embedded in the character, and replacing her inevitably changes the relationship. The story behind that absence also deserves more care than the usual single-sentence explanation: Foster cited her commitment to her doomed Flora Plum film project while speaking very clearly about how protective she and Demme felt towards Clarice. Moore nevertheless deserves to be judged on the woman she plays, a veteran agent whose experience has brought professional disappointment and institutional betrayal. Her harder, more guarded manner makes sense after the passage of time.
The film’s most interesting moral contrast is between Clarice’s stubborn integrity and the people who find it inconvenient. Lecter recognises qualities in her that her own superiors are willing to exploit or discard, which gives his attention an emotional pull without making it safe. Moore is particularly good at retaining that resistance. My only real frustration is that the later film restricts her agency too much, especially when she is injured and drugged. You can understand the Gothic design and still wish Scott had allowed her more room to act within it…
That becomes unavoidable during the notorious dinner sequence, in which Krendler contributes to the meal in a manner no employment contract should permit. Liotta commits completely to the horrible indignity of it, and Hopkins’s patient attention to the cooking makes the scene funnier and nastier than a straightforward burst of gore would have been. It is absurd, and it risks becoming the only thing anyone remembers. I love its nerve, but I can also see why it overwhelms the film for some viewers. Scott is asking an enormous amount of the audience’s willingness to follow the tone he has established.
His change to the novel’s ending is one reason I stay with him. Harris takes Clarice into a relationship with Lecter after an elaborate process of drugging and psychological manipulation; the film keeps her determined to arrest him. When she handcuffs them together, his escape costs him his own hand. Scott’s commentary explicitly frames that choice through sacrifice and affection, while Clarice’s refusal remains decisive. The gesture is monstrous and romantic in Lecter’s terms, and Moore allows the refusal to retain its force. His devotion has not persuaded her to become the person he wants.
Scott also deliberately left out the explanatory material about Lecter’s sister, preferring the character’s capacity for evil to remain something we could not comfortably resolve. Mikkelsen and Fuller later made a similar choice about how far their version’s past should explain him. That connects my favourite film to the television series and helps account for the distance between both and Hannibal Rising: the mystery can accommodate fascination, revulsion and even attachment without requiring a tidy diagnosis.
What makes Hannibal so unique for me, though, is its unapologetic embrace of schlocky grandeur. Scott leans into the excess, transforming the story into something operatic and almost surreal. The set pieces are lavishly designed, from the opulent streets of Florence to the shadowy lair of Mason, each scene dripping with atmosphere. The violence, while gruesome, is treated with a baroque flair that elevates the film into the realm of the grand macabre. It’s horror as high art, a visceral, decadent experience that delights in making you squirm.
There are flaws. The American stretch never quite sustains Florence’s atmosphere, some of the plotting demands considerable indulgence, and Clarice should have more to do at the end. Yet the things Hannibal does brilliantly are the things that make me want to watch it again: Hopkins’s amused command of a room, Giannini’s growing fear, the score’s aching beauty, Oldman’s grotesque entitlement and the confidence with which Scott lets all of them occupy the same film. It is an extravagant horror film made by people willing to risk being ridiculous, and for me the risk pays off spectacularly.
It’s rare to see a film that so perfectly blends the grotesque and the elegant, but Hannibal pulls it off with style and flair. Ridley Scott’s direction, Hopkins’ gleefully sinister turn, and Julianne Moore’s fierce performance come together to create a horror experience that’s as beautiful as it is terrifying. I’m a fan of psychological thrillers and gothic schlock, so for me Hannibal is a feast - an indulgent, operatic descent into darkness.
I love love love this film - and pity anyone who doesn’t 😄
Darkmatters: ö ö ö ö ö
(5 out of 5. My favourite Lecter film, with Florence, Hopkins and an extraordinary score providing ample grounds for another visit.)
P.S. The doctor will see you now
I will also be posting my ranking of all the Lecter-verse, including the TV adaptations; there is a twisted pleasure in returning to them and finding how much room there is inside the same character. Cox’s brisk cruelty, Hopkins’s theatrical command and Mikkelsen’s patient intimacy make different demands on the people around them, and on us. Scott gives the most compelling Clarice take for me, Mann the most troubled investigator, Fuller the most consuming relationship. Demme’s film won all the awards…
But Scott gave me the film I revisit most. If loving a movie enough to travel to the site of its most appalling history lesson counts for anything, Hannibal has already made a fairly persuasive case. I’ll take another trip to Florence, keep my internal organs where they are and decline any unusually thoughtful dinner invitations.
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