Please note: This was screened in Nov 2017
An undeniable classic, Jonathan Demme's seminal spine-chiller, showered with awards upon its release, is one of the great thrillers of the last 30 years and remains as vital and horrific today.
Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is a young, shrewd, attractive FBI trainee, assigned to interview - and bait - brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), whose gruesome insights are required to track down another murderer, 'Buffalo Bill'. But as she tries to pry his secrets loose, he in turn begins questioning her - skilfully digging into her psyche and eliciting long-buried traumas.
Only the third film ever to sweep all the top categories at the Oscars®, the film’s mingling of the horror of violent crimes with the psychological terror of Clarice / Lecter’s slow-burn interrogation, builds to what is still one of the most astoundingly suspenseful climaxes in cinema history. Hopkins is magisterial as the psychopathic Lecter, cultured, quick-witted, uncontainable—a portrait of all the sharpest human faculties gone diabolically wrong. But it is Foster, superb as the steadfast, yet vulnerable Clarice, hyper-competent and able to play Lecter at his own game, that is the film's true ace card as she makes the transformation from helpless victim to rescuing hero in this terrifyingly dark fairytale of an American obsession: serial murder.