The success of ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ gave rise to a belated continuation of the fever for the work of Thomas Harris that led to a series of sequels and prequels both in film and on television that have resulted in a new weekly procedural on the CBS networkwhich arrives in Spain through Amazon Prime Video, with the laconic name of ‘Clarice’, the protagonist of the film and its sequel ‘Hannibal’ (2001), played here by Rebecca Breeds.
This new link in the franchise takes us back to the early 1990s, just one year after Clarice Starling establish an unsettling link with Dr. Hannibal Lecter and stop serial killer Buffalo Bill. Taking advantage of this temporal spectrum is an interesting decision, since the events of the movie are still close in Clarice’s memory, and we can finally see a fiction with Starling without being overshadowed by the figure of Lecter.
A return to the world of Thomas Harris too far removed from what makes it special
The cannibal psychiatrist is the only character that does not appear in ‘Clarice’, moreover, his name cannot even be mentioned, since the production studio MGM does not have the rights to it. This leads to some verbal contortions as when a colleague of Clarice’s comments that hers “last therapist was an inmate at the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane who… ate his patients“. This causes the title of the series to be presented as an alternative to ‘Hannibal’ with the name of the other great pillar of the concept.
This return to the point of origin is also promising because the period of the early 1990s makes it easier to have a classic narrative that can avoid cell phones, laptops or drones, thus crime solving procedure remains old school. On the other hand, this investigation system management turns the format into just another CSI whose only original appeal is that it supposedly belongs to Harris’s nightmarish world of serial killers.
Even with its self-imposed limitation, ‘Clarice’ is a promising but uneven crime thriller, harboring some intriguing storylines, including a hunt for a serial killer who might actually be for hire, or a run-in with a cult leader with echoes of wow, but recreates itself in the clichés of series of this stylewith the investigator who is always in the right place at the right time, and who of course notices things that everyone else misses at a crime scene.
Saving bullets that never get fired
Showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet hold on to the lambs’ thread recreating some key scenes from the Jonathan Demme film, with traumatic flashbacks to the day Starling found Catherine Martin at the bottom of a well and rescued her by gunning down notorious kidnapper Buffalo Bill. A year later, Catherine is a character alongside her mother Ruth, who is now the Attorney General of the United States, in a quiet attempt to create continuity with hers.
Clarice faces the sexism of a male-dominated FBI just like in the film, and her biggest conflict is convincing her condescending therapist, who doesn’t think she’s fit to return to fieldwork. This creates a somewhat disappointing routine, the agent always arrives at the scene of the crime, full of “lords” who make fun of her theories, only to be surprised when Clarice’s assumptions turn out to be true. A dynamic that becomes a great missed opportunity to create a dark procedural taking advantage of the forensic psychology universe that series like ‘Mindhunter’ take better advantage of.
‘Clarice’ also forgets that ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ was a horror movie, and doesn’t choose cases with darkness to match. ‘The Red Dragon’, but another mystery that could be in any series. There are some details, such as the visions of the moth of death, that make one think that the series had some possibilities, which it sometimes finds, showing itself daring and graphic in some shots of mutilated corpsesbut it neither has the operatic ambition of the series with Mads Mikkelsen nor even that of old series like ‘Millennium’, who proposed what this series should have tried to be before it was cancelled.