Hannibal Rising

Director: Peter Webber

What made Lecter, Lecter? You know, that serial killer who sups on the human brain, which he scoops out himself, showing a great delicacy of touch — what gave him the taste for blood? Every time we've seen Anthony Hopkins smile his creepy smile, we've had a great chill run down our spine: who's he going to eat next?

But Hannibal Rising, the movie made from the prequel Thomas Harris wrote just recently, doesn't give us the same frisson. It shows us the death of a little boy, and the birth of a monster, but at no point does it make us want to look over our shoulder.

Young Hannibal and his family — father, mother and sister Misa — escape their majestic Lithuanian castle during the last leg of the Second World War, and take refuge in a cottage in the woods. In a skirmish, the parents perish, leaving Hannibal in charge. He tries valiantly to save his little sister from a horrifying end, but fails. As he grows up, now in the safe keeping of his beauteous Japanese aunt-by-marriage (Gong Li), he sheds the layers of whatever little humanity he had left, and becomes Hannibal. Not just rising, but rampant.

The trouble with the prequel, is not the young lead (Gaspard Ulliel), who does a very good job of learning to keep his real self at bay, and putting on a mask to fool the world. Nor Ms Li, who is exotic and sexy: the relationship between the still-young aunt, and the adolescent boy is played out delicately, but surely. It's to do with all the butchery that goes on as Hannibal recollects what really happened in the frozen cottage so many years back, and how his beloved sister met her end. As he marks out, and hunts down the killers, the blood keeps flowing, and the savagery keeps growing.

After a while, all bodies look alike, regardless of how they've died.

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