The Silence of the Lambs Review

Demme's key decision is a camera choice. Tak Fujimoto shoots the Lecter interviews with the actors looking almost directly down the lens, so the viewer is placed inside the interrogation rather than beside it, and the discomfort becomes structural rather than gory. Jodie Foster plays Clarice as small, watchful and constantly assessed, and Demme keeps filling frames with men looking at her, in elevators, in autopsy rooms, in a West Virginia funeral home. That accumulation is the real subject.

Anthony Hopkins is onscreen for roughly sixteen minutes and reorganizes the entire picture around stillness, a performance built on withheld blinking and a flat mid-Atlantic diction. Ted Levine gets less credit than he deserves, since Buffalo Bill is pathetic and frightening in the same gesture. Howard Shore's score stays low and unresolved. The plot mechanics creak in places, particularly the doorbell cross-cut that cheats geography for a jolt, and the transfer to Memphis exists mostly to arrange an escape. The craft everywhere else is so precise that the trick is forgivable.