Oh my god, that’s fucking disgusting! Excuse my language, but it’s absolutely necessary, because that’s essentially what you will keep telling yourself if you decide to watch the TV adaptation of Hannibal. Initially I was hesitant to watch this at all, because I have the feeling that Hannibal Lecter is a topic as worn out as a pair of twenty year old sneakers. Sure, we all love Anthony Hopkins for his creepy-ass portrayal of fiction’s most famous cannibal. But after Silence of the Lambs, things got a bit less mind-blowing. The feature film Hannibal was fucking disgusting (tough in a different manner from the TV adaptation), and that Red Dragon film with Ed Norton I barely remember. And before you start telling me off, yes, I am aware that there was another Red Dragon film before Silence of the Lambs, but that one I don’t remember either (except for the photo wallpaper).

So, Hannibal, again? Ugh. *rolleyes* That’s what I thought when I heard about the TV adaptation. Why can’t they just leave this topic alone… But eventually, opinions started to appear from the edges of the internet, very subtly seeping through the cracks of tumblr. Then a personal recommendation. So I did what I had to do and started watching. And I have to admit that this show is exceptionally well made. It features not only a very talented cast, but also a brilliant crew. I have rarely seen such hauntingly beautiful cinematography in a TV show! Every aspect of this show is created with meticulous detail, from set design to colour scheme to camera angle to filming locations (Hello again, Toronto).

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But now lets turn to the writers and assign them a nice intensified adjective: fucking insane! I suppose you have to be a little insane to create something that is centred around psychopaths, am I right? They sure are. I was surprised to learn that Hannibal was actually adapted for TV by Bryan Fuller, whose work I have previously enjoyed in Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies – both TV shows that are very macabre, but in a quirky, fluffy sort of way. Hannibal is all that minus the fluffiness: full-on through-the-wall bulldozer macabre. The show Hannibal treats human beings as a resource to be used as modelling clay for art. The creativity of the murders displayed in Hannibal is fucking amazing (also, fucking disgusting). They’re an eccentric taxidermist’s wet dream. The mushrooms, the angels, the violin, the necktie… once you’ve seen this, you won’t go out of the house without a scarf for days.

So if it disgusts me so much, why don’t I just stop watching this fucking disgusting show? That’s a question I kept asking myself with every new episode I watched. I suppose the answer lies in the exceptionally compelling storytelling. Every viewer knows that Hannibal Lecter is a horrible person. We know that his dinner parties are not your average dinner parties and we want to shout at his unsuspecting guests to stop eating. Though we don’t usually see live in action where Hannibal gets his meat from, we just know from the canon and from the suggestive cuts and cinematography. But what we don’t know is what Hannibal’s long game is.

Hannibal is not actually the proper main character of the show. He doesn’t appear in the pilot episode until 30 minutes in, which already suggests that his role is subtle, behind the scenes and manipulative. The real main character of this show is Will Graham, a psychologically unstable criminology lecturer, who assists homicide detective Jack Crawford in solving murders. Will has the unique ability to think like the murderer, thereby finding out the murderer’s motivation, process and (usually) identity. In relation to one of the murders, Jack and Will seek out psychoanalyst Hannibal Lector because he might be able to identify a killer. Jack and Will “befriend” Hannibal and vice versa, and he continues to advise them not only with murder cases, but also with personal psychotherapy. I guess that can’t be good…

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Hannibal is very different from his fellow TV serial killer Dexter. Dexter has become a farce compared to Hannibal – we have grown to like Dexter so much that we don’t want anything to happen to him. He’s not much of a psychopath anymore. He’s a fluffy good guy with a bad habit, a loving dad (how can he love?), brother and friend. Dexter would do everything to save his friends from harm (unless they suspect him, I guess). Hannibal, on the other hand, is at this stage in the show still a genuine bad guy. He doesn’t actually have any real friends, which becomes obvious if you observe his dinner parties. He plots and he manipulates his “friends” to an astonishing degree. His psychological terror is probably what keeps me watching – how can someone be so cruel, yet behave at the same time as such a perfect gentlemen that nobody would ever suspect him?! This show works so well because you keep waiting for the characters to find out that Hannibal is the psychopath in the room, and as the suspension builds up, the show becomes more gruesome and twisted than you could possibly imagine.

Hannibal will blow your mind over and over. Mads Mikkelsen gives an insanely creepy performance here – by the way, he’s not really new to the whole cannibalism thing, as he’s been the star of Danish film De grønne slagtere. The supporting cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Gina Torres, Gillian Anderson, Eddie Izzard and funnily Ellen Muth of Dead Like Me fame as a (sort of dead) girl named Georgia (lol?). But the main subject of Hannibal’s mind-rape is ‘crazy dog dude’ Will, perfectly portrayed by Hugh Dancy. If you have a strong stomach, I can very much recommend this show. It’s a brilliant psychological thriller, beautifully produced, brilliantly performed and very classy. And fucking disgusting.