A horror in the making
Says the Silence of the Lambs spinoff series truly is a waste of your time.
How did they get this so wrong? I really wanted to like Clarice, but this 13-part police procedural is such a ham-fisted insult to the memory of one of the great movies of the late-20th century that it just left me feeling sad and mad.
Perhaps the warning signs were there all along, even a talent as great as Julianne Moore couldn’t recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was Jodie Foster’s performance as Clarice Starling in The Silence of Lambs in the less-than-stellar sequel Hannibal, so what chance did a former Home and Away and Pretty Little Liars star have?
Especially when saddled with some truly terrible dialogue, an ill-conceived premise and being asked to attempt that very distinct West Virginian accent that Foster made her own. No wonder Rebecca Breeds looks miserable a lot of the time she’s on screen.
Perhaps co-creator Alex Kurtzman felt emboldened by the reception for his clever character-focused Star Trek series Picard.
Unfortunately, here Kurtzman reduces the still relatively fresh-out-of-theacademy FBI agent to a traumatised mess trapped in a recurring serial-killer-of-theweek scenario.
It’s a year since Starling stopped Lambs’ Buffalo Bill with the help of ‘‘the good Dr Lecter’’ (a man not named in this series due to rights issues). For her, moving on has involved adopting the families of the murder victims, while avoiding her own and burying herself in the basement of the FBI’S behavioural science department.
‘‘You have PTSD of the most egregious kind,’’ her mandated psychiatrist berates her. But just as he rages that she needs to be taken out of rotation, two officials burst in with orders to whisk her to Washington.
The Attorney General Ruth Martin (Jayne Atkinson) wants her to use her ‘‘public reputation for hunting monsters’’ (as Starling herself says, one based on one case) to assist the Violent Criminal
Apprehension Taskforce in solving the murder of two women whose bodies have been found in the Anacostia River. Oh, and since Martin also just happens to be the mother of the one young woman Starling saved from Buffalo Bill, she demands she start returning her still traumatised daughter’s calls.
That’s just one of the many contrivances that quickly start to pile up on Clarice. Naturally, her appearance is greeted with a fair amount of scepticism and, in some cases, open hostility from her new workmates, apparently ‘‘jealous’’ at her high profile.
‘‘We do evidence here – not ‘it’s a full moon and I’ve got a feeling’,’’ barks her new, hardarse boss Paul Krendler (Michael Cudlitz), whose onenote characterisation seems to involve a permanent scowl.
Other ingratiating oddities and annoyances include Starling’s seeming ability to take all her work home, her new flatmate’s omniscience, what is best described as ‘‘super slo-mo a go go’’ (the show places an over-reliance on the technique) and ‘‘reenactments’’ of key scenes from Lambs.
All the latter does is highlight what a tawdry television spinoff this is.
If you want the real Clarice, seek out the still stunning original 1991 movie. If you want a class TV take on the Thomas Harris universe, the excellent, if truly unnerving Hannibal
(starring Mads Mikkelsen at his magnificent best) is available on Netflix. Just don’t waste your time on this.
Clarice is now available to stream on TVNZ Ondemand.