The Guardian - Disgusting, camp, beautiful: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is an overlooked gem

Muristek

Disgusting, camp, beautiful: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is an overlooked gem

Link [2022-02-18 12:53:09]

With a heightened aesthetic and a standout performance from Mads Mikkelsen, this unsettling show leans into the homoeroticism – and into the ham

Hannibal is streaming on Stan. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click hereGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email and listen to our podcast

Unlike the unending and tedious debate over who is the best Bond, there is no argument when it comes to the best Hannibal Lecter: it is Mads Mikkelsen. Anthony Hopkins’s overripe performance remains firm in the minds of many, but Mikkelsen is truly brilliant in Bryan Fuller’s strange and excellent show, having had the luxury of 36 hours of telly to transform Hannibal the Cannibal into something beyond a bogeyman.

In fact, it takes a while for Hannibal’s toothy side to truly come out in the TV adaptation, which aired between 2013 and 2015. Here, he is a serial killer successfully disguised as a harmless and prissy European oddball, and regarded as a respected psychiatrist in Baltimore. Fuller chooses to focus equally on the cat to his mouse – or the mouse to his cat – Will Graham (played by Hugh Dancy), a prickly and vulnerable profiler tasked by the FBI to help them hunt murderers. Despite being too “unstable” to work as an official agent, Graham is uniquely talented at his gruesome work, so Hannibal is discretely hired by FBI big cheese Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) to keep an eye on his mental health while he does his extremely traumatising day job.