Review of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by Josh R — 01 Jul 2014

This film evaded my scope for a long time. When I wanted to see it, there were a lot of obstacles. I wanted to buy it, but I was out of money. I finally get the money, but the movie is sold out. TV screenings exist, yes, but all in full-screen; just my bad luck. With the Blu Ray release it was easy to get a hold on this movie, and finally, I watched it. It was good, yeah, Oscar-worthy and all that, it's highly memorable and thrilling and chilling and scary and provoking...in the first two acts, that is. My problem with this masterpiece was the third act, which I thought was out of the movie's edgy nod of psychological and horror genre fusion.

First of all, the acting is superb. Foster and Hopkins are the best from the cast, but the rest is also top-notch. It is good that the main characters are the greatest performers. The music by Shore gave the proper ambience to each of the scenes, and I liked the cinematography a lot. I liked how the camera puts you in the point of view of Clarice, that way, you feel the character she's talking to is actually talking to you, and, when speaking to Hannibal, you also feel frightened and scared. It just gives an overall realistic tone, literally putting us in the character; that was just an ingenious idea. All was great, all was unlike anything I've seen, but then comes the Hannibal escape scene. Great scene, but after that, I felt the movie became your regular crime pursuit that you've seen a million times already. It's not an awful third act, after all, it closes the main plot, but I was hoping something more psychologically challenging. Sure it hold my nerves, but it was mostly pure horror genre, and not psychological. The movie held a great fusion between the two in the first and second act, but by the third act it was only one of them.

Nevertheless, the movie still frightens overall and does what a great movie does: it becomes timeless. It's been more than 20 years since this came out and it still frightens people, specially talking about people that already saw it a million times! A must see to say the least, or the most.