The Silence of the Lambs is a 1991 Academy Award-winning film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. It is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, his second to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. In the film, Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is sent to see the imprisoned Lecter in order to ask his expert advice on catching a serial killer given the name Buffalo Bill, who is abducting women and skinning them. The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and it is the only horror movie to win the top prize.
Plot
The FBI is in a desperate search to find a vicious serial killer dubbed Buffalo Bill, who is abducting young women and skinning them. In hopes of obtaining a lead by questioning currently incarcerated serial killers, Jack Crawford, head of the FBI's behavioral science unit, charges Clarice Starling, a promising FBI Academy student, with presenting a VICAP questionnaire to the notorious Hannibal Lecter, brilliant forensic psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial murderer.
Upon visiting Lecter in his cell, Starling is viciously rebuffed by the astonishingly urbane and eloquent Lecter in her attempts to glean information from him. As Starling turns to leave, the maniacal patient in the adjacent cell flings fresh semen onto Starling's hair and face. Lecter becomes enraged seeing this "discourtesy", and calls Starling back to his cell, where he gives her information about one of his former patients in the form of a riddle. Solving the riddle, this information leads Starling to a rent-a-storage lot where the possessions of Benjamin Raspail (the deceased former patient of Lecter's), are contained. Hidden in Raspail's car is a severed head in a jar. It is implied that the head is that of Raspail.
Starling returns to Lecter, and confronts him about the severed head and Benjamin Raspail, whom Lecter denies involvement in murdering. Lecter then makes an offer to Starling: if she puts in a transfer for him to another facility, he will use the case file to profile Buffalo Bill. Starling agrees and the deal is made.
Buffalo Bill then abducts Catherine Martin, the daughter of United States Senator Ruth Martin (Tennessee). Bill's sixth victim is found, and her back has been skinned. After briefly flashing back to the day of her father's funeral, Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy, and the chrysalis of a moth is found in the throat of the victim.
With the stakes heightened, and Crawford having had Clarice propose a faux transfer to a hospital in upstate New York where he will have a cell with a window and more freedom, Clarice must play her way through Lecter's mind-games and lies. Lecter, figuring that the deal is too good to be true, demands personal information from Starling in exchange for information on Buffalo Bill (quid pro quo). Crawford had told Clarice not to tell Lecter anything personal, but desperate for Lecter's help, she ignores Crawford's warning and tells him about her worst childhood memory.
Starling tells Lecter about the death of her father, a town marshal who was killed by two burglars while on night patrol. She was sent to live on a sheep and horse ranch in Montana with cousins. In exchange, Lecter tells her about the significance of the moth found in the sixth victim's throat: it symbolises change (from caterpillar to chrysalis and then into butterfly) and that Buffalo Bill wants to change too. He also tells her about Buffalo Bill's gender identity, and how Buffalo Bill believes that he is a transsexual. He then tells her to search the records at sex-reassignment hospitals for rejected patients based on failed psychological evaluations.
Meanwhile, it is revealed that Frederick Chilton, the asylum's chief of staff, has been secretly recording the consultations between Lecter and Starling in an attempt to finally profile the infamous Hannibal Lecter. Chilton also
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