First Impressions: Hannibal ‘Apéritif’ – This Is My Design

The amount of empty violence on television – particularly against women – is staggering to think about, and the premise of Hannibal only promised to add more. Debuting in the same season as The Following, Cult, and Bates Motel doesn’t help matters either – the barrage of terribly-constructed serial killer/rapist plots have reached a saturation point, so the impending arrival of another blood-soaked pilot hardly sounded promising.

But Hannibal is a completely different kind of show about violence. Centered around FBI serial killer profiler Will Graham, Hannibal is one of the more ambitious network dramas I’ve watched in recent years, as contemplative as it is brutal in its depiction of violence and the effects on it. Will Graham’s a man with the gift and curse of an uncanny imagination, living and reliving violent murder scenes when the FBI calls upon him for assistance.

Throughout the pilot, creator/writer Bryan Fuller and executive producer/director David Slade present a number of dream and dream-like sequences to define his character’s instability. He’s intelligent – and unlike most television cops, is empathetic to a fault, emotionally connected to the images his imagination conjures up. At times, his ability to recreate murders and discover details about a subject are completely unbelievable – but when the character is played so well (Hugh Dancy is simply terrific in the role), and the thematic material is so strong, I’m willing to concede a little mysticism when it comes to Graham’s abilities.

One of the fascinating things about the pilot is how incriminating it is of the world around Graham: he’s a reluctant profiler, more comfortable teaching in a classroom and letting his imagination run free (as we see in the hypnotizing opening sequence, where he visits a murder scene and rewinds the events in his mind). The FBI recognizes it, but are perfectly willing to keep pushing him closer and closer to the fire, particularly his boss Jack Crawford, head of behavioral sciences at the FBI (Laurence Fishburne, in a nicely buttoned-down role). As we see through the pilot, the more murders he has to witness and profiles he has to make, the more unstable he becomes. He sees dead girls in the shadows, and can’t even take a shower without having visions of deer antlers.

There’s a specific reason for the violence in the first episode – unlike The Following, it’s not used as empty indulgence to rack up a body count. Numerous slow-motion shots of blood and/or blood splatter are shown (something I’m sure the network didn’t mind, seeing the audience The Following‘s pilot racked up), and gory images are hung on for extended shots. It’s ingraining the violence in our brains the same way it does to Graham – except for him, he’s living these or vividly imagining them, and each time he does it, it pushes him to a darker, more isolated place (he mentions his social awkwardness), to the point where he’s imagining murdering the girls as well.

It’s a fascinating mediation on the deep-seeded effects of continuous exposure to gratuitous, emotionally unsettling violence, particularly against women. We spend a lot of time during the first hour with Will, and we’re witness to his psychological struggles, watching them deepen as the episode continues.

Of course, Hannibal Lecter is on the show as well, but the pilot smartly keeps most of the focus away from him. There are plenty of creepy moments where he’s eating people yes, but his significance in the pilot is his ability to analyze Graham, and insert him into his inner circle where he can keep his future enemy nice and close. Mads Mikkelsen is surprisingly good as the cannibalistic doctor, a rather subdued performance for a character with a thick accent, a grandiose elegance, and numerous scenery-chewing shots that don’t completely villify him, painting him as a unique, if deeply disturbed entity.

There are some oddities to the pilot’s plot – how was Hannibal eating people that the other guy killed? – but the few flaws the pilot has, it disguises under the fascinating character study of Will (and the wonderful introductory scenes of Hannibal Lecter). Hannibal is definitely not a show for everyone – the brutality of the violence alone will turn off a lot of viewers – but for those interested in deep psychological explorations mixed into a dark crime procedural, Hannibal‘s pilot holds a ton of promise for the 12 episodes to come.

Grade: A

Other thoughts/observations:

– the pilot’s biggest flaw? A complete lack of interesting female characters. The one they do try to introduce (Dr. Alana Bloom) isn’t around long enough to become interesting.

– Hannibal brings Will breakfast, which happens to include the lungs of a recently deceased woman. Or so it’s implied.

– Will adopts stray dogs constantly… he feels bad for those animals who are lost, desperate for a companion. Fuller uses animals quite a bit on his previous shows (Wonderfalls was about a guy who talked to various animal figurines, for example).

– Hannibal definitely has the feel of a crime procedural, but a 13-episode season will allow for tighter, more intricately explored season plots. I have high hopes for this show – networks need to desperately embrace shorter seasons, for both dramas and comedies.

– the cinematography is almost too good for network television.

– This show should not air on Thursday nights…. although it’s hard to find any night this show would find real success on.

– Fuller has said season 4 would integrate the events of Red Dragon, which was the first Thomas Harris novel about the killer, and a great Michael Mann movie (and a not-so-good Brett Ratner one). In the novel, Lecter is in jail after attempting to kill Graham, who finds himself asking for Lecter’s help finding a killer. That would suggest Hannibal is going to be more of a supporting player in this first season.

– The way Slade plays with shadows and animal imagery is really fascinating in the pilot, and sets a cinematic tone it will be hard for other cinematographers to imitate as the series continues.