The Silence of the Lambs

The crux of this excellent thriller is the battle of intellect and wills between them [Clarice Starling and Dr Hannibal Lecter].

A failure that is a function of its success.

Throughout the movie, Demme gets across more terror than a dozen Friday the 13ths by showing not the horrifying thing itself but the faces of people looking at horror.

Scott Glenn's low-key portrayal keeps things anchored in normalcy and provides a scale against which the depths of Hopkins' malice and Foster's troubled nature can be measured.

The Silence of the Lambs is the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is, in a sense, a horror movie, but one that deserves comparison with such great works of psychological terror as The Shining, Psycho and Rosemary's Baby.

A shockingly powerful thriller.

Demme is not interested in blood and guts for the sake of shocking the viewer, but rather the character’s emotional and psychological reaction to the violence. [...] It is this emotional investment that makes Demme’s film so frightening.

Its impact on movies is still being felt today, and it includes arguably the best performances of both Foster and Hopkins' careers.


Suspenseful and shrewd, Hopkins’ Lecter is one of the most fascinating villains in film (despite less than 20 min of screen time). In spite of his contemptible reproach and steely demeanor, there’s just something about Lecter that makes us root for him.

Most books, plays or films never give us even this much. Yet The Silence of the Lambs gives us so much that it's a shame the film doesn't find ways to deepen its concentration on the colossal aberrance of the minds of its complementary terrors.