Hannibal Rising is a 2007 prequel directed by Peter Webber that traces young Hannibal Lecter’s path from war orphan to killer.
At a Glance
- Director: Peter Webber
- Writer: Thomas Harris, adapting his own 2006 novel
- Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans, Dominic West, Kevin McKidd, Richard Brake, Stephen Walters, Helena-Lia Tachovska
- Release: February 7, 2007 (France); February 9, 2007 (United States, United Kingdom, Italy)
- Runtime: 121 minutes
- Studio: Dino De Laurentiis Company, with Carthago, Zephyr and Etic Films; distributed in the US by The Weinstein Company and MGM
- Music: Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi
- Franchise: Hannibal Lecter series
Overview
After three films with Anthony Hopkins, producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted to tell the story of how Hannibal Lecter became the man in the glass cell. Thomas Harris wrote the novel and the screenplay at the same time, and the film arrived just a few months after the book. Rather than a procedural, it is a revenge story spread across postwar Europe, with French actor Gaspard Ulliel playing Lecter as a polite, wounded young man whose grief hardens into appetite. The result is handsome and well acted, though many viewers felt that explaining Lecter made him smaller.
Plot
Lithuania, 1944. As the Eastern Front collapses, the aristocratic Lecter family retreats from their castle to a hunting lodge in the woods. When retreating German troops destroy a Soviet tank stopped at the lodge, the blast kills Hannibal’s parents, leaving him alone with his little sister, Mischa. Soon a band of Lithuanian collaborators led by Vladis Grutas takes over the lodge. Starving in the winter, they look at the children and decide they must eat or die.
Eight years later Hannibal is living in his family’s former castle, now a Soviet orphanage. He escapes to France and finds his late uncle’s widow, Lady Murasaki, who teaches him Japanese culture and swordsmanship. When a butcher insults her at a market, Hannibal kills him with a katana, his first murder. Inspector Pascal Popil, a detective who also lost his family in the war, suspects him but cannot prove it.
Hannibal becomes the youngest student ever admitted to medical school in France. While working with cadavers, he sees a truth serum used on a war criminal and tries it on himself, unlocking the memory he has buried: the men who took Mischa ate her. He returns to Lithuania, buries his sister’s remains, finds the gang’s dog tags and kills Enrikas Dortlich. Back in France he hunts the others one by one, drowning Zigmas Milko in a tank of embalming fluid and tracking Petras Kolnas to a restaurant in Fontainebleau.
Spoiler: The Ending
Grutas, now a sex trafficker, kidnaps Lady Murasaki to lure Hannibal into a trap. Hannibal finds Kolnas, learns where Grutas’s houseboat is moored, and kills him. On the boat, Grutas taunts him with the worst secret of all: that Hannibal himself ate from the broth made of his sister. In a frenzy, Hannibal carves Mischa’s initial into Grutas and kills him. Lady Murasaki, horrified at what he has become, refuses his love and leaves. The houseboat burns, Popil assumes Hannibal is dead, and the final scene shows him in Canada, closing in on the last of the gang.
Production
Webber came to the project after directing the period drama Girl with a Pearl Earring. The film was shot at Barrandov Studios in Prague and co-produced across Italy, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, France and the United States, with a reported budget of $75 million. Ulliel, a rising French star, took the lead; Gong Li, a star of Chinese cinema, played Lady Murasaki, and Rhys Ifans played Grutas.
Place in Franchise
Hannibal Rising sits first in the timeline, before Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. It is the fifth Lecter film, counting Michael Mann’s Manhunter. Critics were largely negative, arguing that a trauma backstory turned a mysterious monster into a familiar revenge hero, though Ulliel’s performance was widely praised. The film grossed about $82.1 million worldwide and found a stronger audience on home video.
Trivia
- Thomas Harris wrote the screenplay himself, the only Lecter film he scripted.
- Aaran Thomas plays Hannibal as a child, with Ulliel taking over for the adult scenes.
- Richard Brake, later a horror regular in Rob Zombie’s films, plays Dortlich.
- Lecter’s samurai-armor mask in the film echoes his famous restraint mask from The Silence of the Lambs.
- Dominic West’s Inspector Popil is a character invented for the novel and film.
- Gaspard Ulliel died in a skiing accident in January 2022.