Do we like Hannibal Lecter?
A character from The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Our score: 2 out of 10. Dazzling company and a gift for insight, but he is a predator who treats people as dinner. We'd enjoy his conversation from behind thick glass and back nothing else.
Hannibal Lecter is a former forensic psychiatrist serving life in a Maryland institution for murders involving cannibalism. In The Silence of the Lambs, FBI trainee Clarice Starling is sent to interview him. Her superiors hope his insight into the criminal mind will help with a case they can't crack.
Lecter is the film's great attraction. He is courteous, cultured and frighteningly sharp, and he reads people in seconds. He offers Clarice cryptic clues, but only in return for pieces of her own painful past. It becomes a battle of wills in which she is never sure how much he is helping and how much he is playing with her.
He scores low because charm doesn't cancel out what he is. He is a calculating predator who enjoys psychological cruelty, and he never shows remorse. He does show a strange code of manners. He is oddly protective of Clarice and offended by rudeness. That makes him magnetic and keeps him a little above a pure monster, but it doesn't make him someone to back.
His cooperation is a means to an end. He bargains for a transfer out of the asylum and uses the chance to engineer a violent escape. The film leaves him free and still amused, so his help never turns into a change of heart.