The film opens with a fateful day in Quantico, where a promising young F.B.I cadet,
Clarice Starling, is summoned by her superior, Mr. Crawford. As she waits for him at his office,
she studies his wall-full of news article clippings, and gruesome crime scene pictures of a
serial killer named Buffalo Bill who the F.B.I is currently after. From what they gathered so far,
Buffalo Bill murders overweight women, and skins different parts of their bodies.
Mr. Crawford assigns her the task of visiting a prison to interview an infamous
psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, and hand him a questionnaire.
The reason why Clarice is chosen is because she has a double degree in both criminology and psychology,
which should equip her in dealing with Hannibal Lecter, who was a brilliant psychiatrist.
Crawford believes Hannibal's insight could prove useful in the pursuit of Buffalo Bill.
Before Clarice leaves, Mr. Crawford warns her of how manipulative Hannibal Lecter can be,
and advises her not to talk about anything personal to avoid getting Hannibal in her head.
At the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Dr. Chilton guides Clarice to Hannibal’s
cell, while making suggestive remarks to her. He then begins telling her how dangerous and
intelligent Hannibal is, so that whatever happens, Clarice must not touch the glass barrier.
He tells her that a few years back, Hannibal complained about having chest pains, but when they tried
getting him help, he took the opportunity to maim a nurse’s face and ate her tongue.
After the doctor leaves her at the entrance of the special inmates’ unit,
the prison’s resident psychiatrist points her to Hannibal’s cell, and leaves her to venture alone.
The hall is filled with the most notorious serial killers, and Hannibal’s cell sits at the very end.
Before Hannibal's cell, an inmate named Miggs gawks at her.
Unlike the rest of the serial killers there, Hannibal’s demeanor is disturbingly calm.
Instead of bars, his cell has a bulletproof wall, and he politely asks to see her credentials.
He finds it rather intriguing that the FBI decided to send a cadet, instead of an actual agent to
interview him. It is clear that he is extremely intelligent and has photographic memory,
because he’s able to draw a fully detailed view of the city of Florence just from memory.
He also knows that Mr. Crawford intends to use him to understand and eventually arrest Buffalo Bill.
When asked why Buffalo Bill skins his victims, Clarice says he does it to make trophies, like
most serial killers. But Hannibal The Cannibal denies keeping trophies, and Clarice counters
that it's clear because he ate his victims. He then asks her to pass him the questionnaire.
Although initially pleasant and courteous, Lecter is unimpressed with the questionnaire
and grows impatient with Clarice's attempts at analyzing him. He expresses this by
berating her and making disturbingly accurate assumptions about her background, which is that
she’s a hillbilly who came from a poor family. Shocked, Clarice responses that Hannibal should
look at himself with that kind of accuracy, and taunts Hannibal that maybe he's too afraid to.
Offended again, he tells her that the last time somebody tried giving him a
questionnaire, he ate their liver out. And with that, he tells her to leave.
When she gets up and starts pacing the hall, one of the inmates, Miggs, suddenly flings
his semen at her, which draws Hannibal’s attention so he yells at her to come back.
He tells her that he can't stand the thought of her having to deal with such indecency,
so he’s giving her another chance to interview him under this condition: “look within yourself,
and track down my old patient, Ms. Mofet.”
As she heads back to her car, she breaks down
in tears from the experience, and comforts herself by reminiscing about a childhood
memory of welcoming her sheriff father home.
The following days go by normally for her as
an FBI academy student, only now she spends study hall researching about Hannibal Lecter.
But not long after, Mr. Crawford calls her to inform her that Miggs is dead.
Hannibal spent all day saying words to him until Miggs somehow swallowed his own tongue and died.
Clarice then updates that she thinks Hannibal’s last words, which are the phrase "look into
yourself," were a code. Therefore, she did her research, and found a storage house named “Your
Self Storage” located in Hannibal’s hometown. When she gets there, she is informed by the
keeper that the place is a storage unit under the name of Ms. Hester Mofet, that hasn’t had
a visitor for the past decade. Since the door is stuck, they have to use a car jack to pry it open.
Inside, she unveils a car underneath a massive American flag, and finds a
headless mannequin inside. To her horror, there she finds a preserved human head inside a jar.
With this discovery, she rushes to revisit Hannibal, and proves her intelligence by
figuring out that the name Hester Mofet, is an anagram for ‘the rest of me.’
Therefore, she believes that Hannibal was the one who rented the storage unit, not Hester Mofet.
Hannibal then tells her that the head she found is his former patient,
Benjamin Raspail, whom he assures that he didn't kill, but only kept his head.
He suggests that Raspail was killed by someone as an experiment. Clarice now believes that his
former patient is linked to Buffalo Bill, and that Hannibal knows Buffalo Bill's identity.
Hannibal finally offers a psychological profile of Buffalo Bill in exchange for better facilities,
where he can view trees out of an open window, and be far from the rude Chilton. He tells her to
make her decision quickly, since Buffalo Bill must already be searching for the next special victim.
Meanwhile on the other side of the story, a woman in Memphis Tennessee is driving back home,
while being watched by a man in night vision goggles. The woman just arrived
home when she notices a man with a cast on his arm, struggling to lift a couch into his van.
She decides to help him out of sympathy, and hops into the truck to position the chair inside.
After strangely asking her if her clothes are a size 14, he hits her unconscious.
He checks the size of her coat, happy to see that she's a size 14. He then slices her blouse,
and drives off with satisfaction after discarding the blouse on the ground.
On the next day, Clarice is summoned out of her training to accompany Mr. Crawford
investigating a recently discovered dead body of a woman in Virginia.
On their way there, Crawford shows her another Buffalo Bill’s victim’s body he
found a few weeks ago, whose back had been skinned. Apparently, Buffalo Bill kept her
hostage for three days without raping her before he shot, skinned, and dumped her body.
They find the local sheriff at the morgue of a local funeral home, where a funeral service
is taking place just in the other room. Clarice looks into the funeral ceremony,
causing her to briefly have a flashback of attending her father’s funeral.
After asking the local police to leave, the FBI unzips the body bag in front of them and begin
to examine it. Without taking long at all, Clarice is able to point out that the victim must be taken
from out of town, because her accessories and make-up don’t look like that of a local.
Not only that, the dirt under her broken fingernails shows she crawled to escape. And lastly,
she discovers that a cocoon has been tucked inside her throat. They discover that this
one is also missing the skin in two large diamond shaped sections in her buttock area.
Up next, Clarice takes the cocoon she discovered for her biologist friends to study,
and they reveal to her that it’s a Death’s Head moth, a species exclusive to Asia. Based on
the state of the moth, they also conclude that someone specifically raised them in this area.
At the same time, we are finally shown a view of Buffalo Bill’s house,
where he keeps several insect terrariums, and is sewing in his birthday suit.
A woman’s scream for help can be heard from inside a well in the other room.
On the next day, Clarice overhears a news coverage on the kidnapping of the woman
we saw in the previous scene. Her name is Catherine Martin, who as it turns out is
the United States senator’s daughter. They also watch the Senator deliver a heartfelt
message to Buffalo Bill, begging him to show compassion and let her daughter go.
With this kidnapping, the US government is now putting Catherine’s rescue in priority,
so they send Clarice for another chat with Hannibal Lecter. This time taking with her
a series of charming offers if Lecter could help catch Buffalo Bill. This offer includes relocating
him to a nursing home with a view, and an annual supervised week-long vacation to Plum Island.
He accepts the offer, though with the condition that Clarice shares more
personal stories with him, which she agrees to. Clarice begins to share about how her father was
murdered by two armed robbers when she was little. As a result, she moved to live in a
ranch with her mom and stepdad, until she ran away one day, but not because of abuse. In exchange,
he asks if Catherine was a large woman, which Clarice confirms. She informs him about the moth
they found in the previous body, and reveals they found the same cocoon in Raspail's head.
Hannibal tells her that a moth represents transformation, and based on the fact that
Buffalo Bill has been skinning his victims, he is preparing for a transformation of his own.
Hannibal believes Buffalo Bill was abused as a child, causing him to hate his own identity
and think of himself as transgender, though he is actually not. Another hint from Hannibal is
that he's convinced that Bill must have tried to sign up for gender reassignment surgery,
at all three major sex reassignment clinics there, but was rejected due to his twisted mindset.
Unbeknownst to them, Dr. Chilton who is jealous that the federal government
sent for Clarice instead of him is eavesdropping on their conversation.
On the next scene, Buffalo Bill is forcing his victim Catherine to rub lotion all over her skin,
and threatens to hose her down if she says no. She cries and begs for him to let her go,
but of course he doesn’t listen. Bill lowers a lighted basket to retrieve the lotion,
which lets Catherine see the bloody claw marks on the wall. The poor Catherine only screams
all the more, while he only makes fun of her.
After Clarice leaves, Chilton puts Hannibal on
heavy restraint, and mocks him, saying that he just discovered that the offer Clarice
presented him was fake. Not only that, Hannibal is being transferred to another
prison in Tennessee. During this interaction, Hannibal secretly keeps eyeing Chilton’s pen.
A convoy of police officers escort Hannibal on his flight to Tennessee,
and when they get off, Chilton couldn’t find his pen but makes no big deal of it.
They proceed to wheel Hannibal Lecter to face the Senator, who now gives him a real offer
in exchange for her daughter’s safe return. And so, Hannibal informs her Buffalo Bill’s
age and physical description, as well as where he possibly leaves. Hannibal claims to know all this
because Buffalo Bill’s boyfriend, Raspail, used to be his patient until Buffalo Bill killed him.
Afterwards, we see Clarice rush into Tennessee’s courthouse to visit Hannibal Lecter.
Despite the fact that she lied, he still entertains a conversation with her and begins
to vaguely talk about how people kill because of envy, and what they envy is what they see everyday.
But other than that, he refuses to share more until she elaborates more of her story on
why she ran away from the ranch as a child.
Clarice then reveals that she ran one early
morning after hearing screams. She went to the barn and saw the lambs screaming
as they were being slaughtered, and tried to free them but they wouldn’t’ run. So instead,
she took one lamb and ran away with it, wanting to save one life at least. She tries to escape,
but being caught and sent back to the orphanage. This statement symbolizes her desire to do
good and save the innocent, and Lecter emotionally thanks her for sharing the memory,
But before he manages to say his piece to help her, the jealous Chilton arrives to escort
her out, because he wants to be the only one credited for handling Hannibal. For some reason,
Hannibal seems determined to hand her back her case files, and she takes it eagerly.
Later that evening, it is now Hannibal’s dinnertime. Hannibal demands an extra meal
of extra rare lamb chops, much to the annoyance of his guards.
They begin with cuffing him to the cage bars for safety measure. But unbeknownst to them, Hannibal
has been tucking in a pen’s tip inside his mouth this whole time, and uses it to un-cuff himself.
When one of the cops kneels to retrieve his tray,
he suddenly cuffs him to the cage,
and takes a bite out of the other’s mouth,
before finishing off the handcuffed cop by beating him bloody.
Soon after, the police officers downstairs notice the elevator
indicator move to the fifth floor although no one is currently authorized to go there,
followed by a series of gunshots. The elevator then moves again and stops at the third floor,
prompting several officers to head up there. Upon arriving, they discover Hannibal’s cell open,
and a disemboweled body of an officer on display. Meanwhile, the other one’s face
had been horribly lacerated, but he’s miraculously still breathing.
Special forces and ambulance units are sent to the scene immediately to rush the dying officer
over to the hospital. However on the elevator way down, they notice blood leaking from the ceiling.
When the elevator stops, the police chief quietly informs his team that a wounded
Hannibal is hiding on top of the elevator, while the injured officer is rushed to the hospital.
Two officers even go upstairs and look through the elevator shaft to check. Because they need
him alive to help catch Buffalo Bill, an officer shoots him in the leg to
merely incapacitate him but he remains still. And so, the special unit downstairs decide to
open the elevator shaft, only to reveal that it’s a dead fellow officer whose face had been skinned.
Unbeknownst to them, the real Hannibal is actually inside the ambulance, wearing the skinned officer’s face.
Not long after, Clarice gets informed that the ambulance was found by the side of the road with
the medic dead, and additionally, Hannibal also killed a tourist. Despite it all, Clarice is now
more determined than ever to solve Buffalo Bill’s case by studying the case files Hannibal just
handed her. He scribbled on a page, emphasizing on the fact that there is a pattern in the victims.
This reminds her of the conversation about envy, and how it’s more than likely that
Buffalo Bill’s first kill was someone he knew personally, Fredrica Bimmel, who lived in Ohio.
Clarice continues the investigation by driving up to Fredrica, the first victim’s home, and looking around
the house. Seeing the stitching supplies, she discovers that Fredrica was a tailor.
She then finds dresses with templates identical to the patches of skin Buffalo
Bill took from his victims' backs. Clarice is finally able to piece together a theory
and calls Mr. Crawford to present it right away. She deduces that Bill is making
a human skin suit to turn himself into a woman. But Mr. Crawford states that they’ve found
the culprit thanks to the help of Hannibal Lecter’s hint about the three major sex
reassignment clinics. They are now on their way to Chicago to arrest the guy.
While this is happening, the senator’s daughter Catherine appears to be tying a bone to a string
that Buffalo Bill uses to bring her lotion, and throws it to the top. She begins calling his dog
to try baiting it to fall down the well, while Buffalo Bill is busy dressing up, feeling himself
in front of a camera while playing loud music.
Despite what Mr. Crawford said, Clarice still
continues her investigation. She meets up with Fredrica's friend, and from there
discovers that the victim used to work as a seamstress for a woman called Mrs. Lippman.
Meanwhile inside Buffalo Bill’s hide out, Catherine has successfully baited the dog.
Buffalo Bill panics when he discovers Catherine holding his dog and threatening to hurt it if
he doesn’t hand her a phone.
At the same time, armed FBI agents have arrived in front of a house,
and prepare to ambush the killer's house. Back to Buffalo Bill, he hears
the doorbell ring, and is forced to answer it.
But instead of armed FBI agents at his door, he
finds an unsuspecting Clarice, who is here because this house used to be Mrs. Lippman’s residence.
During this time, in a completely different city, Clarice’s superior Mr. Crawford ambushes into an
empty house, and it’s at this point he finally realizes that Clarice is out there on her own.
Back to Clarice, Buffalo Bill lets her in and introduces himself as
Jack Gordon. He calmly tells her he has Mrs. Lippman's son's number for her to contact.
As she ventures deeper inside the house, she notices a Death’s Head moth inside the house,
which automatically makes her realize that she’s found the serial killer.
She immediately takes out her gun, but he runs away before she could shoot him.
She follows him to the basement, where she discovers a shady hallway leading to his lair. Clarice then hears
Catherine’s scream for help, and finds her inside the well, but the killer is nowhere to be found.
Clarice asks Catherine to calm down, while she continues to look for him. But as she enters the
bathroom, the lights go out all of the sudden. Unable to see, she tries feeling her way
through, while the killer who is wearing night-vision glasses quietly follows her.
He has fun by reaching out, until he barely touches her.
The man starts to raise his gun, but reveals himself by cocking his revolver.
Clarice reacts quickly and shoots him, consequently blowing a hole through the wall.
This enables her to see Buffalo Bill, the now-dead killer, lying on the ground.
The next scene shows the senator’s daughter safely walking out of the building, while
holding the fluffy dog, while Clarice walks away with a proud Mr. Crawford.
Days later at the FBI Academy's graduation
ceremony, Clarice receives her official F.B.I. badge with honorable accolades.
She thanks Mr. Crawford for his mentorship and the opportunity he gave her.
During the after party, she suddenly receives a phone call from Hannibal Lecter, who’d like to
send his regards and assures her that he doesn’t plan on killing her, because the world is better
with her in it.
Before the film ends, he announces that he's "having an old friend for dinner," and
we can see that Dr. Chilton is there. He hangs up, and walks away, leaving Clarice shaken.