Screenplay Synopsis REVEALED
More than 85% of you said you wanted to read the synopsis of my "Hannibal" remake screenplay now and far be it from me to go against democracy.
The synopsis appears below the fold. Please keep a couple of things in mind:
This is a DRAFT, I am reasonably confident that this is how I want things to go, but as I actually get into writing the individual scenes, things may strike me and I might make changes.
I welcome ideas, but please keep things positive.
Clarice and Hannibal run off together at the end. That is non-negotiable.
Act I
Clarice Starling, 32, is a world weary FBI agent whose career has gone nowhere. She is a veteran of joint assignments with other agencies and today she is part of a joint ATF / DEA raid on a meth lab. We first see her in an undercover van, briefing the team about the suspect they are waiting for, and sharing an orange with an ATF Agent, John Brigham, who is a close friend.
The raid goes South and Brigham is killed in the ensuing shootout, which we see mostly through flashbacks. Clarice is forced to shoot and kill a mother with an infant strapped to her chest after the woman pulls a gun from beneath her baby sling and shoots Clarice.
Clarice is placed on routine leave. The newspapers begin publishing a series of sensationalized, gory photos from the aftermath of the shootout and label Clarice the FBI’s “Death Angel” because she has won awards for marksmanship.
A few days later, Clarice gets a letter from Hannibal Lecter, a psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial killer. Lecter escaped from prison seven years ago after trading his insights on an open serial murder investigation for personal information about Clarice. She hasn’t heard from him since that time. This new letter contains insight about her current predicament that reflects the deep and strange bond they still share. She reports the letter to the FBI.
FBI Director Charles Tunberry plans to throw Clarice under the bus for the botched raid. He discusses these plans with Clarice’s professional mentor, Jack Crawford, promising him that if he doesn’t try to help her, he will retire from the FBI as a Deputy Director. While Crawford and Tunberry are talking, Tunberry receives a call from Deputy Assistant Attorney General Paul Krendler - who has until now been Clarice’s professional nemesis.
On Krendler’s end of the conversation, we see that he is sitting in a darkened room. Behind him, a large fish tank holds an enormous eel. On an overhead projector, we can make out the neat copperplate Lecter used in his letter to Clarice. We can hear the rhythmic sound of a ventilator over the phone line as Krendler tells Tunberry to reassign Clarice to the Behavioral Sciences Unit to spearhead the hunt for Lecter.
Clarice, who demonstrated an aptitude for profiling serial murderers during her work with Lecter, has long aspired to work for Crawford in the Behavioral Sciences Unit. She is now given her dream job and assigned to update the profile of Lecter and reinvigorate the search for him. Crawford shares with Clarice his belief that Mason Verger, Lecter’s only surviving victim and the politically powerful heir to a meatpacking fortune, is involved in the decision to assign her here.
Crawford warns her that he has long suspected that Mason is hunting Lecter for his own purposes and that he only involves himself with the FBI’s investigation when he needs something he can’t get on his own. He hints at the extent to which Lecter mutilated Mason and mentions that he almost never leaves his bed and lives on a ventilator.
Clarice begins by reviewing Lecter’s personal effects. She is making slow progress through the disorganized items when her best friend and housemate, Ardelia Mapp, comes by to drop off her lunch. Mapp zeroes in on an intricately carved wooden box, with a faithful rendering of Alexandre Cabanel’s “Pandora” on the lid. Mapp reminds Clarice that the virtues of humanity were enclosed in the very bottom of Pandora’s box, and the two discover that the box has an almost seamlessly concealed false bottom.
Inside are previously undiscovered patient records: notes pertaining to Mason’s younger sister Margot. The notes reveal that Margot’s father, now deceased, sent Margot to Lecter when she was ten years old to be “cured” of her evident lesbianism. Lecter simply helped her learn how to hide it better. In the notes, Lecter describes a pattern of physical and emotional abuse of Margot by her brother - including a threat to “feed her to his pigs” - that Clarice finds disturbing, even after everything she has seen in her seven years with the FBI.
Clarice begins to take a closer look at Mason and his relationship to Lecter, hoping to understand why Mason is the only victim that Lecter never ate or killed. She reads through police reports from Lecter’s attack on Mason and learns that the two men met at Mason’s church. Lecter told Mason his name was Fred Lane, and the men became close.
According to police reports from the time of the incident, “Lane” drugged Mason out of the blue one day and then used psychological techniques to manipulate him into mutilating himself before leaving him for dead. It was not known until Lecter’s capture several years after the incident that police found a match for the one partial print “Fred Lane” left on a bannister in Mason’s home.
Clarice requests an interview with Mason Verger and is given a scheduling run around by his people. Shortly afterwards, she gets a call from Margot Verger who offers to speak with her. Margot a butch lesbian and body builder, tells Clarice about her sessions with Lecter. She shares that he suggested they take walks in his garden when he knew she couldn’t sit down because of an injury Mason inflicted on her.
Margot tells Clarice about Lecter’s extraordinary stillness and the specificity with which his taste dictated every aspect of his life. She says that he took her shopping and helped her find clothing that was feminine enough to help her stay closeted while still honoring some of her own taste, which she says is still one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for her.
Clarice asks about Mason, saying that Lecter’s notes from that time document a pattern of abuse that an ethical mandatory reporter would have shared with police. Margot reveals that she asked Lecter not to tell anyone, since that would only make her life at home harder. She says she didn’t know until years later that Lecter was the person who attacked her brother, but that she thinks he did it to protect her.
Clarice asks where Margot thinks Lecter is now, if she had to guess. Margot says he’s probably somewhere in Western Europe. She reveals that her brother has people monitoring music festivals and museums there, ostensibly to report them back to the FBI. Clarice asks Margot if she thinks Mason is sharing everything he finds with law enforcement and Margot scoffs.
Meanwhile in Europe, we meet Chief Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi of the Florentine Questura, who is looking into the disappearance of the curator of the Palazzo Capponi. He meets with the curator’s temporary replacement, Dr. Fell, at a gathering of scholars who are discussing whether or not Fell should be given the curator position permanently.
Pazzi observes the meeting, during which the scholars decide that Fell must give a lecture to the Studiolo: a group of notoriously difficult-to-please scholars. If they approve of his lecture, then the job is his. After the meeting, Pazzi and Fell talk briefly about the former curator. Pazzi sets up a time with Fell to collect the man’s effects and departs with a strange feeling about Fell but no concrete suspicions.
On his way back to his office, Fell runs into one of the scholars from the meeting who is an eager gossip. The scholar tells Fell that Pazzi is something of a joke in Florence. He was once the golden boy at the Questura for catching a notorious serial killer and spent time studying profiling with the American FBI, but that he fell into disrepute when the man he caught was exonerated. Fell shows polite interest in the story and the two part company. As he walks away, we see Fell’s face harden.
Several days after their initial encounter, Pazzi comes to the Palazzo Capponi to retrieve the missing curator’s effects. Peering inside Lecter’s rooms, he sees a half-finished sketch and notices the uncanny resemblance of Fell’s work to a sketch by Hannibal Lecter that hangs on the wall at the BSU. Back at his office, he compares the shape of Fell’s face and ears in his work permit photographs to pictures of Hannibal Lecter and begins to suspect in earnest that Fell is Lecter. He sets out to prove it and collect the $3 million bounty that Mason Verger has placed on Lecter’s head.
Lecter, in his rooms at the Palazzo Capponi, reads more about Pazzi. He realizes that Pazzi truly does have all the makings of an epiphany and begins making contingency plans to leave Florence. That night, he has a nightmare about a group of men chasing a bedraggled little girl in a torn dress through a frozen wasteland and wakes up screaming.
The next day, Lecter reads further tabloid coverage of Clarice Starling’s role in the botched ATF raid and draws a gryphon with a lion’s body using a cutout photo of her face for the head. He writes a note next to the gryphon, then goes to the famous Farmacia della Santa Maria and purchases a large package of lotions, bath oils, and soaps. He slips his note with the drawing of the gryphon in with the packaging and has the shop send it to Clarice.
Pazzi, who is following Lecter in the hopes of getting something with his fingerprints on it, snatches up a perfume sample card from the trash and sends it to Mason’s people, which qualifies him for an advance on the reward money and a call with Mason himself, who we see silhouetted against the tank that holds his eel.
Back in Baltimore, Clarice meets with Barney Matthews, a former orderly at the asylum where Lecter was held for eight years, to ask him about the Lecter memorabilia he’s been selling illicitly. Barney gives her what he says is his entire cache of remaining artifacts, which include a few charcoal sketches of a ten year-old Margot Verger wearing a tattered dress, her hair in mats and her face stained with tears.
Clarice asks Barney whether he and Lecter ever talked about the Vergers, Mason Verger in particular. Barney tells Clarice that Mason may be the only person that Lecter truly hates. Clarice asks if that’s why he’s the only victim Lecter never ate and that he left him to live with his injuries rather than killing him outright. Barney nods and tells Clarice that Lecter always said that he preferred to eat the rude, but that Mason was something else entirely.
Meanwhile, Mason Verger is having nightmares of his own. In his dreams, he is young and healthy. A beautiful, seductive man comes to him and turns him on and teases him and then brutalizes him before laughing at him and leaving him for dead. When he wakes, we see him in the light of day for the first time and recognize the extent of his injuries.
Now fully awake and fuming, Mason calls on his right hand, an assistant named Cordell, and tells him to cripple ornamental carp and feed them to the eel for his amusement. He watches with a savage smile on his fleshless face.
Back in Florence, Pazzi meets with Carlo, Mason’s head kidnapper, and discusses their plans. Pazzi asks what Mason plans to do with Lecter. Carlo tells him not to ask questions he doesn’t want the answers to. The following evening, Lecter lectures to the Studiolo. Afterwards, Pazzi attempts to maneuver him into the kidnappers’ waiting hands. Instead, Lecter kills Pazzi and Carlo’s brother Marco, who is one of the kidnappers. Lecter then escapes on the back of a motorcycle driven by a local.
Clarice gets word that Lecter has killed in Florence and believes that the incident has all the makings of a botched kidnapping attempt. She lies awake in bed and sees Lecter’s face in the shadows of tree branches on her ceiling. She now knows that Mason Verger is hunting Lecter for vengeance and that she has to catch Lecter before Verger does.
Act II
Clarice looks over her notes from her interview with Margot, where she has underlined the word “taste,” multiple times. She reaches out to some of Lecter’s other known associates to ask about the things he likes.
She first speaks with his ex, Rachel DuBerry, who mentions that Lecter wasn’t especially emotionally available, but that he was always very generous - often buying fine wine from her birth year for special occasions. Clarice also speaks to Senator Ruth Martin, whose daughter Lecter’s insights helped save from the serial killer Buffalo Bill seven years ago. She learns that, during their brief meeting, Lecter complemented Martin on her tailored Givenchy suit. Martin also mentions that Lecter seemed to have a taste for pain and that he mocked her about having breast fed Catherine. In her notes, Clarice writes down the words “Givenchy” and “breast fed,” right next to one another.
Clarice begins setting up a complex system, tracking purchases of fine wine and foods, tickets to cultural events, musical instruments, luxury vehicles, and other items Lecter has a track record of enjoying. Krendler comes by Clarice’s office to grill her about her methods. She confronts him about his repeated efforts to torpedo her career over the years, which go back to her showing him up professionally and then rejecting his advances years ago. He laughs in her face.
Clarice goes home and complains about Krendler to Ardelia Mapp, lamenting that ever since she was sent to an orphanage as an eleven year-old, she’s always done well following institutional rules but can’t stand the politics.
Meanwhile, Mason Verger is seething about the failed attempt to catch Lecter in Italy, especially after he receives a letter from Lecter taunting him and watches a video of Lecter waving “bye bye”to a surveillance camera before disappearing into the night. He demands to see Krendler, who uses Mason’s need for vengeance to wheedle more money out of Mason for his upcoming campaign for Congress. He then explains Clarice’s methods to Mason, who is pleased.
Cordell calls Krendler to Mason’s farm to meet with a hired Lecter expert, Dr. Doemling, to do their own profiling exercise. Doemling is a psychiatrist who only met Lecter once but has published extensively on him. He reveals that Lecter is the son of a Lithuanian Count and an Italian Visconti and that his parents were killed during the shelling of his ancestral home in early 1945.
He also reveals that there were birth records of a sister, but that no further information about her exists. He surmises correctly - but for the wrong reasons - that Lecter will show himself if Clarice is visibly distressed. Mason grills Margot about her sessions with Lecter, but she says very little.
Mason reveals that he has laid the groundwork for Clarice’s ouster from the FBI, which should provide the necessary distress, by placing a fake classified ad from Clarice to Lecter in the Italian newspapers warning that enemies were closing in and that he should flee. (The implication being that she knew Lecter was in Florence before he murdered Pazzi.)
He tells Krendler to be ready to use the false letter to cut Clarice loose once they have evidence of Lecter’s whereabouts. Krendler gives Mason a sophisticated, DOJ-issue GPS transmitter that he can have placed on Clarice’s car so she can lead them to Lecter when the time comes.
After everyone else leaves, Margot pleads with Mason. She and her wife Judy want to have a child that can inherit the Verger fortune - which requires that the child be genetically related to their late father. She cannot get pregnant, she says, but Judy’s family generally has no trouble conceiving. She asks Mason to donate sperm, which he sneeringly says he’ll consider but makes no promises.
Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter makes his way back to the United States amidst a tour group of Canadians. He refuses to eat airplane food and instead brings aboard his own special meal, which is quickly discovered and co-opted by a plucky little girl who looks like the child from his dream.
He closes his eyes and tries to sleep, but has a flashback of the little girl being murdered by Nazi soldiers alongside a scrawny little deer in a snowy wasteland. He screams and the little girl on the airplane, who is now bedraggled and wearing bloody clothes wakes him up, takes his hand, and tells him that sometimes she has nightmares too.
When Lecter arrives in the United States, seeing Clarice Starling is his first order of business. He watches her leave her car at a national park and start off on a run. Once she is out of sight, he breaks into the car to smell the air inside. He catches up with her and watches her running alongside a group of healthy adult deer.
He has a flashback to the little girl playing in the garden, a pleasant memory. Later that evening, he has a much worse flashback while playing the harpsichord, remembering Clarice running, then seeing the little girl in her bloody rags standing in his parlor and flashing back to the little deer on the bloody snow.
Back in her office, Clarice gets a call about the murder of a deer hunter with characteristics that matche a bulletin the FBI put out about Lecter. She receives a parcel from a messenger with some DNA samples, which she sends to the FBI’s lab. She notes in her profile that, if this is in fact Lecter’s work, it would be the second deer hunter he has killed and not just butchered but also mutilated.
Back at Lecter’s rented accommodations, the little girl’s rags are gone. She is now wearing a clean dress. Her once-filthy, matted hair is now clean and braided into pigtails. Lecter and the little girl, who he calls Mischa, discuss the concept of entropy. He shows her a video of Stephen Hawking explaining that the proliferation of chaos is the only thing that separates the past from the future.
He wonders aloud if he might be able to reverse entropy, allowing Mischa to return by taking over Clarice’s place in the world. She giggles at the idea and praises her clever older brother. Lecter orders a very expensive bottle of wine from Clarice’s birth year and draws up a set of disinterment papers from Grant County, WV while humming “happy birthday” to himself.
The DNA results come back as a match for Lecter, which Clarice’s office mate dutifully reports to Krendler. Clarice overhears his end of the conversation from the hallway outside their office.
Krendler calls Cordell to tell him the news. Now that they know Lecter is in the DMV area, Cordell gives Krendler the order to cut Clarice loose. Krendler exclaims to Cordell that his job just became a lot easier because of a recently-waylaid package that Lecter sent to Clarice from Florence - which could be made out to look like a “thank you” for the tip off.
Clarice’s office mate takes a break. Suspicious, she goes to his desk and pushes the speed dial button on his phone. She hangs up when Krendler answers. Disgusted, she leaves the office and goes to visit John Brigham’s grave. She leaves an orange there, in remembrance of the orange they shared in the van before the raid where he was killed, and talks to him about how tired and unhappy she is.
That night, Clarice is served with papers telling her to report to a hearing the next day. Crawford and Ardelia both accompany her, but neither are allowed inside the room where Starling is railroaded by a group of three men, one of whom is Paul Krendler. She is told to hand over her badge and gun while a formal investigation into her relationship with Lecter is conducted.
We see her briefly fantasize about putting a bullet between Krendler’s eyes. Back in reality, she hands over her kit while he gloats. Meanwhile, in the parking garage, Mason’s goons install the transmitter underneath Clarice’s car.
As they are leaving the hearing, Crawford collapses with chest pains. After he is taken away by EMTs, Ardelia accompanies Clarice back to her car past throngs of press who seem to have been tipped off about the hearing. Krendler emerges and gives an interview that condemns Clarice with faint praise. Lecter sees the interview on television and comments to Mischa just how rude Krendler is.
Later that afternoon, Lecter takes his disinterment papers to West Virginia, where he has Clarice’s father’s bones exhumed. Then he drives to Baltimore, impersonates a surgeon, and steals large quantities of heavy hypnotic sedatives from the surgical pharmacy at Maryland Misericordia Hospital.
Back at Mason’s, we learn that he has hired Johnny Mogli a sheriff’s deputy moonlighting as security for him under the pretext that Clarice has been making threatening phone calls to his house. In reality, Mogli is there to give the kidnap squad legal cover should they be challenged by law enforcement in the process of capturing Lecter.
It is Clarice’s birthday, just a few days before Christmas, when Mogli, Carlo, and the kidnap squad tail her to a grocery store parking lot. While she is in the store, Lecter puts the expensive bottle of wine in her car. The kidnap squad tranquilizes Lecter and seizes him.
Clarice hears the muzzle signature of the tranquilizer gun and sees the snatch as she comes out of the store, but only realizes that what she witnessed was the kidnapping of Hannibal Lecter when she finds the bottle of wine with a note in his handwriting in her car. She tries to get the FBI to take her seriously, but her perceived allegiance to Lecter and vendetta against Mason Verger impedes her credibility.
She decides that she cannot allow Lecter to be slaughtered and makes her way to Mason’s rural Maryland farm to rescue him.
Act III
At Mason Verger’s farm, Hannibal Lecter is bound to an enormous wooden cross attached to a forklift. He is derisive towards the kidnappers, who eye a nearby animal pen with fear and suspicion. Squeals and grunts can be heard coming from the pen.
Mason Verger appears on a view screen overlooking the pen, Margot at his side, and tells Lecter that he is about to be devoured, feet first, by a herd of man-eating pigs. Rather than responding with tears and terror as Mason would have him do, Lecter teases Carlo about how bad his brother - who Lecter killed in Florence - must smell now. As he says this, he looks directly into the monitor, apparently addressing Margo on the subject of dead brothers. Carlo takes a farrier’s hammer and begins to swing it in Lecter’s direction. The other kidnappers pull him off, telling him that if Lecter dies before the pigs get to him, there will be no money.
Margot comes to the barn to talk to Lecter while Cordell gets Mason hooked up to his battery powered ventilator so he can come down to the barn and watch Lecter be devoured in person. Lecter asks Margot why she is participating in this and she reveals her hopes for a family with Judy. Lecter tells her that she will never get what she wants by playing along with Mason. He tells her she will have much more luck using a cattle prod to stimulate Mason’s prostate.
He reminds her of what he told her during their therapy sessions when she was a child: that it will be most therapeutic if she kills Mason herself once she’s able to ensure that she can get away with it. He encourages Margot to rip out a piece of his scalp and several hairs so that she can use the DNA evidence to frame him after Mason is dead. Margot rips the hairs and a flake of skin off his head before grabbing a cattle prod and leaving the barn with a look of determination.
Mason arrives at the barn to watch Lecter be eaten. The kidnappers open the doors of the pen and let the pigs into the barn, where they sniff and root around. They approach Lecter but, smelling no fear, do not engage him. As the pigs mill about, Clarice arrives and fires a shot in the air. She orders everyone to get down on the ground, which everyone near the pigs hesitates to do because they know that prone figures excite them.
Clarice unties one of Lecter’s arms and gives him her boot knife to cut himself loose. She spots Johnny Mogli pulling his gun and puts two slugs neatly through the star-shaped sheriff’s badge on his chest. He crumples backwards and out of sight, drawing two of the pigs. His screams of horror prompt Carlo and his team to flee, but the pigs respond to their fear and they are swiftly set upon.
Carlo shoots at the pigs, hitting several, but missing others. The stray bullets hit Clarice multiple times. Clarice falls, bleeding badly, and hits her head hard on the base of the forklift. Lecter picks her up and carries her out of the barn while the pigs, honoring his lack of fear, make way for them both.
Cordell drags Mason back up to the house and puts him back on his permanent life support machines. Mason is whining and abusive and tells Cordell to go away. As Cordell leaves the room, Margot smashes his skull with a kettle bell. Margot then enters Mason’s room with a cattle prod. She taunts him and applies the cattle prod directly to his prostate, collecting the resulting semen in a non-spermicidal condom. Then she takes the eel from its tank and shoves it down his throat. As he dies, she plants Lecter’s hairs on him and on the glove she used to handle the eel.
She goes home with the condom tucked between her breasts.
Meanwhile, Lecter provides Clarice with emergency medical care in the back seat of her car. He applies tourniquets and packs her wounds with gauze from the medical kit he finds in her car. He examines her pupils and, finding them responsive and of equal size, decides that it’s safe to leave. The car’s engine booms as he accelerates onto the highway.
The next morning at the Verger farm, Mason’s body has been discovered. Margot and Judy are at the crime scene in their bathrobes, both visibly upset. A sheriff’s deputy is interviewing them. Margot tells him that they were asleep at their house when they got the call that some kind of massacre had occurred at the farm. Margot manages tears, saying that she was only just starting to repair her relationship with her brother and he had just recently donated sperm so she and Judy could have a baby.
Another deputy approaches the group and informs them all that Johnny Mogli is dead with two .45 slugs in his chest and that the only .45 at the scene is registered to one Clarice Starling, the woman who had been making all the threatening phone calls to Mason.
Margot barely manages to hide her surprise, and is able to pass off the flash of recognition on her face by saying that Clarice once interviewed her about Hannibal Lecter. The deputy asks whether she thinks Lecter had anything to do with the massacre and Margot shudders and says she doesn’t want to think about it.
Back at Lecter’s house, Clarice is in bad shape. Lecter has set her up with an IV and a heart monitor. Mischa watches as he removes bullets from her body, stitches her wounds, and inserts a needle into his own arm to transfuse blood to Clarice. Later that night, he sits at her bedside alternately sketching her and Mischa and writing out complex mathematical calculations, a look of profound concern on his face.
Back at Mason’s farm, the Sheriff is patched through to Director Tunberry at home. He asks point blank whether Clarice Starling might have been at Mason’s farm with Hannibal Lecter, and whether either one of them could have shot a one of his deputies dead from 50 feet away with a .45 caliber hand gun.
Tunberry’s eyes go wide. He tells the Sheriff that he doesn’t know how good of a shot Lecter is, but that he’s damn sure Starling could have picked off a man from that distance. The deputy hangs up with Tunberry and orders an APB out on Starling, saying that she’s wanted for the murder of a law enforcement officer and aiding and abetting a wanted fugitive.
That night, Clarice is awakened from a heavily drugged sleep by screaming from elsewhere in the house. She tears out her IVs and goes to investigate on unsteady legs. She finds Lecter thrashing in his bed. She goes to his side and puts a hand on his shoulder. He moans, “Mischa,” before waking and seeing her.
Lecter tells Clarice that she really shouldn’t be up, and escorts her back to bed. She asks him why he was screaming and he deflects, saying that it is a conversation for another day. He re-starts her IV and injects something into it that puts her instantly back into a deep sleep.
Days pass. When Clarice finally wakes again, Lecter is at her bedside. He shines a bright light in her eyes and then retreats to an armchair at the far side of the room. He asks her about the last thing she remembers. She recounts the basic details of what happened at the farm and then says she recalls Lecter giving her his blood. He nods and she thanks him for that kindness.
She asks him if she is free to go and he says that she is, but warns her that it would probably be smarter to stay put. He turns on the television and lets her see for herself: her photo is all over the news alongside his, wanted for the murders of meatpacking heir Mason Verger, a sheriff’s deputy, and several others. Shocked, Clarice agrees to stay and Lecter smiles.
Paul Krendler is lying low and preparing for blowback when his involvement with the massacre becomes known. He gets a call from a powerful United States Congressman inviting him to a meeting with himself and Margot Verger to discuss his political future. Krendler is relieved and prepares to meet the Verger helicopter.
Clarice sits on the sun porch looking out at the Chesapeake with a troubled expression on her face. Inside, Lecter plays the harpsichord and talks to Mischa about his preparations to make a place for her in the world. Mischa asks if Clarice really has to die and says that she thinks Clarice is pretty. Lecter nods in agreement and smiles softly, but his eyes are sad.
Over a glass of wine in the parlor that night, Clarice tells Lecter that she hates being misrepresented as a murderer. He asks her why it bothers her what others think when she knows the truth. She considers and says that she doesn’t know.
She asks him again about his nightmare and he tells her about Mischa’s murder: about how he gave Mischa all his food and was too weak from starvation to fight the Nazi soldiers when they came to butcher and eat her. When the story is finished, he wipes a single tear away while Clarice does the same and fights her impulse to embrace him.
Their talk turns to her motives for rescuing him from the barn that night. He notes that she has a habit of breaking into other people’s barns to rescue the sacrificial lamb and asks her why that might be. She shrugs and he tells her that it seems there is much she doesn’t understand about herself. He says he has chemical means to offer her some insight, if she’ll let him help her.
After a bit of mulling, Clarice agrees to the drugs Lecter has suggested. Lecter gives her an injection of one of the powerful hypnotic medications he stole from the hospital, then tells her that her father is here to see her. She responds enthusiastically. After he leaves the room, her father enters in his marshal’s uniform.
They talk at length and he tells her that he’s proud of everything she’s done, from the clean shooting at the ATF raid to the way she saved Lecter’s life. He peels an orange for her with his boot knife and leaves the peel in one long curl on the table before getting up to leave. As he departs, we can see the bullet hole through the back of his hat.
Lecter returns and invites Clarice into one of the house’s many empty bedrooms. There, surrounded by candles, her father’s bones are neatly arranged on a piece of broadcloth. He tells her that her father is truly gone. He puts his hands on either side of her head and tells her that the only approval she will ever need from him already exists within her.
She sobs heavily, holding her father’s skull and confesses how angry he is that he let himself be killed by a couple of drug-addled pissants. Lecter responds that all her father ever wanted was her happiness, happiness that she has a right to.
Later that night, Lecter speaks with Mischa again. He tells her that, instead of sacrificing Clarice, perhaps there might be a way to make a place for Mischa inside her. Mischa readily agrees that this is a better plan.
The next day, Lecter goes to Rock Creek Park, where Paul Krendler is on his way to meet the Verger helicopter for his meeting with Margot and the powerful congressman. Instead of the helicopter, he finds Lecter, who injects him with a sedative and carries him back to his waiting truck for the drive back out to the Chesapeake.
That night, Lecter enters Clarice’s bedroom with a garment bag and finds her in the bath. Flushing a little, he looks away and tells her that he is leaving something in her wardrobe that he would very much like for her to wear this evening. He tells her that dinner is at 7. Later, Clarice takes the garment bag, which says Givenchy on it, from the wardrobe and opens it to find a dress of cream silk, very décoletée, with a beaded jacket.
She puts the dress on and comes into the parlor, where Lecter is waiting for her with a glass of wine and another syringe. He finds himself momentarily speechless as he takes her in, then asks her to trust him. Hesitantly, she allows him to inject her. He points to a nearby pier glass and tells her to look at herself and appreciate her own beauty. Again, he encourages her to think first of her own happiness, as that is what her father would wish for her.
At dinner, Lecter moves a large flower arrangement to reveal Paul Krendler. Krendler goads Clarice, and Clarice goads him back while Lecter heats a pat of butter in a copper fais-toute. Lecter then neatly removes the top of Krendler’s skull and cuts sections out of his brain to sauté in the butter with herbs and caper berries. Clarice accepts the brains, served on a crouton, and even asks for seconds. Lecter kills Krendler shortly thereafter and wheels his body back into the kitchen. Clarice and Lecter eat the rest of their meal companionably.
After dinner, Lecter and Clarice drink golden wine and eat from ramekins of soufflé topped with curls of orange zest. While Mischa looks on, Lecter explains entropy to Clarice, and shares that there was a time when he believed he might open a place in the world for Mischa by sacrificing Clarice, but that now he believes there might be a place for his sister within her instead. Clarice challenges him, saying that Mischa’s proper place is within him, just as her father’s place is within her.
He nods, considering what she has said as Mischa stands behind him and places her hand on his shoulder, he reaches up to take her hand, considering Clarice.
Seemingly apropos of nothing, Clarice asks him if his mother breast fed him. He says that she did and Clarice asks if he ever resented having to give up the breast for Mischa. He says that he does not remember, but that he believes he would have done so gladly. Clarice reaches into the bodice of her dress and takes out her own breast, saying that he does not have to give up this one.
Mischa vanishes from behind her brother as he goes to Clarice and eagerly takes her nipple in his mouth. That night, they sleep together. At one point, with Clarice’s consent, Lecter bites her to the point of drawing blood and she finds that she likes it. They share a giddy smile and continue having sex until the early hours of the morning.
In the light of dawn through the bay window, Lecter looks at a sleeping Clarice with an expression of awe. When she awakens, he asks her if she will come with him and she agrees.
Thirty years later, Ardelia Mapp is exploring an art museum in Buenos Aires with her wife. While her wife steps away to take a phone call, Ardelia meanders to the next gallery, where she sees Clarice Starling, now in her fifties, and Hannibal Lecter, now in his eighties, looking at a visiting Vermeer. Lecter sees her and she runs, but he catches up with her before she is able to reach an exit.
Clarice comes looking for Lecter and finds him with Mapp. She and Mapp embrace and she assures Mapp that she is truly happy. Lecter offers Mapp a syringe, telling her that she will have a seizure and forget the last half hour or so. She agrees and he injects her. She falls to the ground and Clarice shouts for help.
Later, Ardelia is loaded into an ambulance with her wife at her side. Clarice and Lecter get into a waiting car and drive away. Clarice thanks Lecter for letting Ardelia go and he says he’s a man of his word; he only kills rapists now.
Clarice smiles and, taking his hand, asks him what’s for dinner.
