The Silence of the Lambs (2001)

The 1991 screen adaptation of the book by Tomas Harris called "The Silence of the Lambs" is often referred to as the best thriller movie in the history of cinema. It has recently been included in the US National Film Registry as a model thriller and a movie of great artistic value. Only three films have ever managed to win five Academy Awards in the most prestigious nominations including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor, - It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. Another stunning fact about this fascinating movie is that Anthony Hopkins got his Oscar statuette for a personage who appears in the frame for only about 16 minutes in total. That was an absolute record.

FBI faces one awful case of femicide after another. Some serial maniac nicknamed Buffalo Bill kidnaps young women, kills them and skins their corpses after several days of torturing. The number of victims grows. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), a young student of the FBI Academy gets an important and difficult task. She is to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) kept in solitary quarters of the hospital for criminally insane. Lecter is a highly sophisticated former psychiatrist who has committed a number of horrible cannibalistic murders. Clarice is to get in touch with the incarcerated man and to find some clues to the serial murders.

The plot has many underlying symbols and associations. In the course of her communication with Dr. Lecter Clarice reveals her secrets and hidden sides of her personality to Lecter, who plays with her like a cat with a mouse. The woman gets to know herself better, she finds out her own hidden physical and psychological potential. Having become an object of Lecter΄s psychological experiment, the heroine of Jodie Foster passes through a considerable moral evolution.

The personage of Hopkins surely deserves special attention. The actor showed a very scrupulous and thorough approach to the creation of Dr. Lecter΄s image. He studied the dossiers of serial assassins, visited well-publicized trials and accepted some real prototypes for the image. Once he watched a video with serial maniac and a sectarian Charles Manson and noticed that he didn’t blink and stared at his interlocutor’s face during the whole conversation. Thus he managed to exert great psychological pressure on the interviewer. Hopkins imitated that manner creating the image of Lecter. Manson, now a life-term prisoner, is known first of all as the murderer of the pregnant wife of Roman Polanski, the director of such famous movies as The Ninth Gate, The Pianist and the cult 1968 thriller Rosemary’s Baby.

The Silence of the Lambs enjoyed a fair critical acceptance. Many observers and critics state that this marvelous thriller is one of the most significant crime movies about serial murders in the world’s cinema treasury. The Silence of the Lambs is also compared to Seven by David Fincher, another chilling thriller about a horrific chain of serial murders.

There is not so much action in this two-hour-long thriller, but due to the unbelievable tension and growing atmosphere of suspense which is felt from the very first frames of the sinister forest where Clarice does her training, the movie makes you feel creepy all over. It enhances you so much that a couple of days after having watched The Silence of the Lambs you will still be replaying particular episodes in your mind with great amazement.