Why THIS Hannibal Feels So Real
All Hannibals have their strengths, but Brian Cox's performance in Manhunter is uniquely terrifying.
This is my Hannibal. There are many like him but this one - Brian Cox in Michael Mann's 1986 crime thriller Manhunter - is mine. Maybe it's weird to claim ownership over notorious fictionalised serial killer cannibals, but when they're this good, it's hard not to.
Hannibal Lecter did not begin as a cinematic icon. Manhunter, his first big-screen appearance, was quite infamously a flop, with Hollywood only cracking the Thomas Harris code to mainstream success with Jonathan Demme's masterpiece The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. There, Dr Lecter, played to chilling perfection by Anthony Hopkins, was imagined as a gothic, borderline theatrical supervillain, sequestered into the service of the FBI to help track down the rampant Buffalo Bill.
Hopkins' performance is legendary, and it had the immediate effect of establishing "Hannibal the Cannibal" as one of the all-time great villains of the silver screen. He would reprise the role a further two times (once in an okay-ish sequel and again in a ropy prequel), before Mads Mikkelsen made it his own with the no-right-to-go-as-hard-as-it-does TV adaptation, Hannibal, created by Bryan Fuller in 2014.
But Hopkins and Mikkelsen aren't the Hannibal I spend most of my time thinking about. While they're both creepy and beautiful in their own ways, the Lecter who's most managed to burrow his way under my skin isn't a Lecter at all. In fact, he's a Lecktor, and he featured in that previously mentioned flop which, in time, has come to be appreciated as the masterpiece it always was, and yet which remains overshadowed by the success of successive adaptations.
Manhunter Was More Than 'Just' The First Hannibal Movie
Michael Mann's Manhunter - an adaptation of Harris' first Hannibal novel, Red Dragon - embodies all the indelible qualities that have made the director one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of the last 50 years. It is a tone poem as much as it is a literary adaptation, dwelling on the themes that have entangled Mann's cinema since his directorial debut with Thief in 1981. There's the elusive lead, an avatar of longing and isolation caught between his profession and a life he resides in, but cannot exist; there's the elemental aspect, beaches and oceans and concrete and neon; and there's the technical propulsion, the commitment to minutiae that renders true authenticity.
Mann, ultimately, was drawn to elements of Harris' fiction that were not the same as those that piqued the fascination of Demme and Fuller, which led to a more emotionally nebulous and procedurally minded adaptation than its descendants. The psychology of Harris' Red Dragon remains, but is drawn through the same prism of emotion and feeling that has typified Mann's filmography, with the central theme of Manhunter revolving around identity and perception. How do we see, and who sees us in return?
For Will Graham (here played by William Petersen), these questions are destructive and all-consuming. An FBI profiler who inhabits the minds of killers to take them down, Graham is drawn back into the hunt against his will by old ally and FBI director, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina). Graham, while gifted, was left traumatised following the grisly capture of serial killer Hannibal Lecktor, an event which led to him experiencing a psychological break. The fracturing of his identity also posed an existential threat to Will: was he embodying these killers through technique alone, or was it so easy to hunt them because he too shared their compulsions?
Mann and Petersen stoke this anxiety slowly and expertly, first with Crawford's beachside plea to Will, and then with his first walkthrough of a crime scene left behind by his target, the Tooth Fairy. Graham, dressed in black, slowly readopts his old methods, the chalk-white eighties interior evoking not only the ghostlike vibes of a structure stripped of life, but also Will's shadow-like essence. He's once again creeping through the aftermath of monstrosity, and mirroring those movements and processes like an echo of the man he'll eventually confront.
As Will is pulled back to his profession, so too is he pulled back towards Hannibal. He does this, as Hannibal realises near the conclusion of their reunion, to "get the scent back again". Will is pulled face-to-face with Dr Lecktor not to glean his perspective - at least not immediately - but to stare death in the face.
And Cox, arguably more than any other Hannibal, embodies death most convincingly. There's a disturbing nonchalance to his cadence, an open-mouthed satisfaction as the cogs turn in his head, and a piercing, wide-eyed gaze that stares straight into Will. He hates his guts - hates that he was outthought and caught, and hates, potentially, that Will considers himself different. "If you want the scent back, smell yourself!" he exclaims, weaponising Will's insecurity and fear, but also perhaps verbalising his own frustration that a kindred spirit would deny his true self.
Why Manhunter's Hannibal Is So Convincing
The initial encounter between Graham and Lecktor makes for one of the best scenes in Manhunter, with Petersen and Cox channelling the energy of the moment almost unfiltered, and Mann blocking the sequence so as to illustrate Will's vulnerability and Hannibal's menace even behind bars.
At the beginning of the scene, Lecktor is partially obscured by his cell door. Mirroring Will's perspective sitting outside the cell, we hear Hannibal before we see him, until he sits up and his face is framed by the bars of his cell. Will's face is also framed for Hannibal, with Mann once again returning to the theme of seeing and being seen. It's an exchange that, in essence, presents vulnerability, but more so for Will in this instance than for Hannibal. Low-angle shots emphasise the claustrophobia of the space outside Hannibal's cell, as does Petersen's rigid, defensive-like posture. The message is already clear by the time a panic-stricken Will rushes to the exit: this is Lecktor's domain, and our intrepid FBI investigator has exposed himself.
Will running the gauntlet with Hannibal - an essential trial by fire to track down the Tooth Fairy - leads into some of the tensest cinema of Mann's career, where Dolarhyde makes contact with Lecktor and the FBI finds itself in a race against time to uncover the pair's correspondence. The prelude to this exchange also showcases Hannibal's cunning even when defanged by captivity, where he uses his statutory phone call to track down Will's home address, having already determined that his frenemy has relocated to somewhere warm and sunny. It's a sequence that does so much with so little, communicating Hannibal's academic background, his manipulative streak and his pettiness, and typifies what makes Cox's portrayal so believably insidious.
Hopkins' Lecter is seminal - a gothically drawn depiction that feels positively Dracula-esque at times in terms of both his hypnotic quality and in the way he engulfs the frame. Cox's Hannibal, conversely, is just a guy. A guy who kills people. His menace lies in his casual pretence, his incisiveness - that sharp, fanged cadence that belies the pacifying nature of confinement. It feels like one of cinema's great ironies that Cox's Hannibal is so believable as a guy who eats his victims (as mentioned in this all-timer Letterboxd review), when he features in the sole adaptation that doesn't incorporate that element.
He also delivers one of the great, economical performances as Hannibal, possibly even more so than Hopkins, who famously won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Silence despite only featuring in a fraction of the movie's runtime. Cox's contributions to Manhunter come to about 10 minutes of screen time, between his initial reunion with Will, his telephone escapade, and an additional call with his old rival at the conclusion of the second act, and an argument could be made for each scene being Manhunter's best.
Cox's Hannibal isn't the only convincing sicko in the film, of course. The late, great Tom Noonan is mesmeric as Francis Dolarhyde, a giant of a man whose capture and execution of Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang) makes for one of the most convincing and gutting depictions of violence in Mann's filmography. He's a director who's always walked a line between balletic and unvarnished violence, the two often impacting in the middle and generating a kind of kinetic surrealism. It's a skill perfect for an adaptation of Red Dragon, with Dolarhyde a character consumed by dreams, and Will a man haunted by them. Their final confrontation also feels utterly dreamlike, with Mann unfurling the action into a staccato-like eruption of gunfire and shattered glass.
In blending the superreal with the surreal, Mann created a near-perfect psychological thriller. Manhunter is a film that constantly upends his grounded sensibilities but it unlocks an added dimension behind his emotive brand of filmmaking, delving into the idea of a fragile sanity in a cruel and violent world. "Feel first, ask questions later" has always felt like a guiding principle of his films, and Manhunter - typified in the exchanges between William Petersen's Will Graham and Brian Cox's Hannibal - might just be the most unfiltered of them all.