Manhunter has turned 40 and a new ‘Final Cut’ is in cinemas. This will prick the ears of a relative few, because for many, Hannibal Lecter began in 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps cinema’s biggest transgressive mainstream hit.
Jonathan Demme’s film won the “Big Five” Oscars with a serial killer who skins women and stitches their hides together to make fleshy bodysuits, realising his macabre transvestite fantasies. Disgusting, but not unprecedented, as Lambs was downstream from Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Manhunter, the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’s elevated popular fiction.
Watching Manhunter, two things are clear within 10 minutes. First, this is very much a film of the ‘80s, with a conspicuous synth score that’s creepy and brooding, if a little Forensic Files on occasion. Second, this film is painterly. From offices and bedrooms to beaches and marshland, locales and figures are beautifully arranged, lit and graded. This point is especially relevant, as Michael Mann has overseen a new 4K scan that impresses with its deep contrast that brings new strength to blues, greens and clinical whites of police offices and prison walls. A 4K disc coming this winter could be reference quality.
Manhunter may be beautiful, noirish, and an important influence on the ‘serial killer canon’, but its main talking point is often Brian Cox’s performance as Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (not a spelling mistake). As any contrarian will tell you, it’s better than Anthony Hopkins’ theatrical turn in 1991. Well, maybe. Cox is cold, disagreeable and distinctly ordinary. If he wasn’t wearing a boiler suit behind metal bars, he could be an ill-tempered bank manager. It takes an awful scheme against Graham to remind you that Lecktor views death with excitement, achievement, and indifference, and that’s unnerving. Hopkins, meanwhile, is enjoyably maximalist, for better or worse.
