SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

picture by hendra boeniardi
YANCHEP NATIONAL PARK - WEST AUSTRALIA
A psychopath nicknamed Buffalo Bill is murdering young women across the Midwest. Believing it takes one to know one, the FBI sends Agent Clarice Starling to interview a demented prisoner who may provide clues to the killer's actions. That prisoner is psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant, diabolical cannibal who agrees to help Starling only if she'll feed his morbid curiosity with details about her own complicated life. As their relationship develops, Starling is forced to confront not only her own hidden demons but also an evil so powerful that she may not have the courage - or strength - to stop it!
Promising FBI Academy student Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is pulled from her training at the FBI Training Facility at Quantico, Virginia by Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, who asks her to present a VICAP questionnaire to the notorious Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), brilliant forensic psychiatrist and incarcerated cannibalistic serial killer. After learning the assignment relates to the pursuit of vicious serial killer Buffalo Bill, Starling travels to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and is led by Dr. Frederick Chilton to Hannibal Lecter, the sophisticated and cultured man restrained behind thick glass panels and windowless stone walls. Initially pleasant and courteous, Lecter grows impatient with Starling's attempts at "dissecting" him and viciously rebuffs her. As she departs, another patient flings fresh semen onto her face, enraging Lecter who calls Starling back and suggests she checks up on one of his former patients. The name he gives turns out to be a riddle which leads Starling to a rent-a-storage cubicle where she discovers the severed head of a man.

Starling returns to Lecter who offers her a towel to dry her rain-soaked hair; she uses it, though she was told that "if he attempts to pass you anything, do not accept it". Lecter claims that the man is Benjamin Raspail, a former patient. He states that he did not kill Raspail, but hints to a connection with Buffalo Bill and offers to profile the killer if he is transferred to a facility away from the venomous careerist, Dr. Chilton.

Miles away, Buffalo Bill abducts Catherine Martin, daughter of United States Senator Ruth Martin. Starling accompanies Crawford to West Virginia and attends the autopsy being conducted on the body of another of Bill's recently-discovered victims. She observes something in the victim's throat, and a chrysalis of a Death's-head Hawkmoth is extracted. When news of Catherine Martin's abduction sweeps the country, Crawford authorizes Starling to offer Hannibal Lecter a fake deal promising a prison transfer and better conditions if he provides information that helps profile Buffalo Bill and rescue Catherine Martin. Once a year Lecter will even be allowed to stay for a week on an island where he will be able to walk on a beach (under full SWAT surveillance) on government facility — Plum Island.

Instead, Lecter begins a game of quid pro quo with Starling, offering comprehensive clues and insights about Buffalo Bill in exchange for events from Starling's traumatic childhood, specifically those following the death of her father, a small-town policeman killed when she was ten, leaving her an orphan. Starling thus breaks more of the rules: don't "let Hannibal Lecter inside your head"

Unbeknownst to both Starling and Lecter, Dr. Frederick Chilton tapes the conversation and, after revealing Starling's deal as a sham, offers to transfer Lecter in exchange for a real deal of his own making. Lecter agrees and following a flight to Tennessee meets Senator Martin and her entourage of FBI agents and Justice Department officials. He goads her over her relationship with her daughter but also claims that Buffalo Bill is the late Raspail's gay lover Louis Friend, who Lecter met after Friend had killed a vagrant and "done things with the skin". (Raspail was the man whose head Starling found in the warehouse.)

Meanwhile, Catherine Martin is held prisoner in a basement dry well with Buffalo Bill and his Bichon Frisé "Precious" looking down on her. Bill orders her to rub herself with oil, contemptuously referring to Catherine as "it".: "It rubs the lotion on its skin, it does this whenever it's told". The terrified Catherine begs to go home and see her mother, telling her captor that her family will pay any ransom he demands. Bill begins to cry, proving Starling's earlier statement in the film that he referred to his victims as "it" so he doesn't see them as human beings and therefore feel remorse for his actions. Angry at this lapse in his usual calm, Bill angrily tells Catherine to put the lotion in the basket and pulls it up. At this point, Catherine sees the fingernails of a previous victim who attempted to escape embedded in the wall of the well. She screams in horror, and Bill joins her in screaming, due most likely to no other reason than his obvious insanity.

Starling travels to Lecter's special cell located on the third floor of the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis, Tennessee, where she confronts him about the false information he gave the Senator: "Louis Friend" is an anagram for iron sulfide also known as fool's gold, to which Lecter simply says "Oh, Clarice, your problem is you need to get more fun out of life." He mocks the false offer she and Crawford made, especially since it is costing Catherine valuable time. Lecter refuses Starling's pleas for Buffalo Bill's real name and demands she finish her story surrounding her worst childhood memory. She recounts her arrival at a relative's farm, the horror of discovering their lamb screaming as they are being slaughtered, and her fruitless attempts at rescuing a lamb. Lecter rebuffs her pleas for a name, simply giving a few pointers and claiming that everything she needs to find Bill is in her case files. He hands them back, and touches her finger, before she is escorted out of the building by Chilton and the police officers.

Hours later, Lecter escapes from his cell, attacking his two guards. Police storm the room and discover one guard bloody and barely alive and the other disemboweled and dramatically strung up on the wall of the cage. Paramedics transport the surviving officer to an ambulance and speed off while a SWAT team searches the building for Lecter. As the team discover a bleeding body in the elevator shaft, the survivor in the ambulance peels off a mask of skin covering his face (carved off the second guard whose body was found in the elevator shaft), revealing Lecter in disguise. It is later revealed that he kills the paramedics and murders a tourist in the airport parking garage before disappearing.
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter

After being notified of Lecter's escape, Starling pores over the case files, analyzing Lecter's annotations and realizes that the first victim, Frederica Bimmel, probably knew Bill in real life before he killed her. Starling travels to Bimmel's hometown, interviewing her friends, meeting her father, and searches her room. She discovers that Bimmel was a tailor and dressmaker and had dresses with templates identical to the patches of skin removed from Buffalo Bill's victims. Starling concludes that Buffalo Bill is a tailor fashioning a "woman suit" of real skin — Lecter had suggested that Bill had applied for sex change operations and had been turned down.

Starling telephones Crawford, who is already on the way to make an arrest, having cross-referenced Lecter's notes with Johns Hopkins Hospital, where Buffalo Bill may have applied for a sex change operation, and finding a man named Jame Gumb, who also had a passion for the sort of moths found in the throat of the victim he and Starling examined together. Crawford instructs Starling to continue interviewing Bimmel's friends while he leads a SWAT team to Gumb's business address in Calumet City, Illinois.

The raid proves to be a dead-end, however, when the cops break into what turns out to be an empty house.

Starling's interviews lead to the house of "Jack Gordon", who Starling soon realizes is actually Jame Gumb, and draws her weapon just as Gumb disappears into his basement. Starling pursues him, discovering a screaming Catherine Martin in the dry well just before the lights in the basement go out, leaving her in complete darkness. Gumb stalks Starling in the dark with night vision goggles and a Smith & Wesson Model 686 .357 Magnum. In preparation to shoot her, he cocks the revolver and Starling, upon hearing the clicking mechanism of the gun, swivels around and shoots blindly into the darkness, killing Gumb.

Days later after the FBI Academy graduation party, Starling receives a phone call from Hannibal Lecter, now in the Bahamas. Lecter assures Starling that he has no plans to pursue her, and asks her to "extend me the same courtesy". He then excuses himself from the phone call, remarking that he's "having an old friend for dinner", before hanging up and casually following his former jailer Dr. Frederick Chilton through the streets of the village.