Hannibal Rising is a prequel to Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal. It shows a young Hannibal Lecter from childhood in Lithuania, to his teen years in France, and up to his arrival in Canada. Lecter is boy of 8 years old at the beginning of the film (1944), living in Lecter Castle in Lithuania. Lecter, his younger sister Mischa, and his parents escape to the family’s hunting lodge in the woods to elude the advancing German troops. Back at Lecter Castle, six Lithuanian militiamen (Grutas, Dortlich, Grentz, Kolnas, Milko, and Pot Watcher) request to join the Waffen-SS. The SS commander orders them to kill the Lecters’ Jewish cook who was left behind, to which they gleefully comply.
A Soviet tank stops at the Lecters’ lodge looking for water, and forces everyone out of the house. However, the tank is then spotted by a German bomber. The bomber is shot down by the tank, but subsequently crashes into it, and the explosion kills everyone but Lecter and Mischa.
The SS militiamen then loot Lecter Castle. Seeing their wounded SS commander, Grutas shoots him and takes his badge. However, the impending Russian advance force them to hide out in the woods, where they locate the Lecter lodge. They storm and take over the lodge. Finding no other food in the bitterly cold Baltic winter, the men look menacingly at Hannibal and Mischa. Mischa becomes the food for the sadistic soldiers while Lecter looks on helplessly after being knocked down by one of them.
Eight years later inside Lecter Castle, which has been turned into a Soviet orphanage, a bully harasses Lecter. The bully attacks his head, but Lecter blocks his swing with a fork, impaling the bully’s hand. That evening, Lecter experiences his first flashback about Mischa, which angers the youth commander, who locks him in a dungeon. However, Lecter escapes from the castle orphanage and finds his way to Paris to live with his widowed aunt, the Lady Murasaki. She manages to get him to speak for the first time, and manages to get him to do flower arrangement, martial arts, and ancestor worship.
One day, while at a local market, a butcher makes a crude remark about Lady Murasaki (he says something about “pussy”). Lecter then asks him to repeat before he attacks him. Later, Lecter goes home and gets a sharpened katana. While the butcher is fishing, Lecter requests an apology from him, and is denied. He disembowels the butcher with a katana, then decapitates him. He is suspected of the butcher’s murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who had also lost his family to the war. While Lecter’s questioned by the inspector in the police station, Lecter’s aunt discreetly but cleverly put the butcher’s head (which is missing) just right outside the police station. A Nazi symbol is drawn on the butcher’s head to make the police to believe it was the Nazi that killed the butcher.
Eventually, Lecter becomes the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. He receives a working scholarship at a hospital in Paris, where he is given a job preparing cadavers. One day, Lecter witnesses a condemned war criminal receiving a sodium thiopental injection to force him to recall details about his war crimes. In an attempt to recall the names of those responsible for his sister’s death, Lecter injects himself with the solution. His subsequent flashback reveals that the pot watcher was killed when the Russians bombed the lodge, and the dogtags were still left in the ruins of the lodge.
Lecter then returns to Lithuania in search of his sister’s remains. While crossing the Soviet border, he draws the attention of Dortlich, who is now a Soviet border patrol officer. Lecter excavates the ruins of the lodge where his family died, and also unearths the dog-tags of the group of deserters who had killed his sister. Dortlich attempts to kill him but is incapacitated by Lecter. After he buries Mischa’s remains, Lecter forces Dortlich to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of his gang, and then decapitates Dortlich with a horse-drawn pulley. Dortlich’s blood splashes on Lecter’s face, and he licks it off. Later, the Soviet police arrive on the scene, only to discover Dortlich’s head, its cheeks carved off, and a brochette and a dogtag on his mouth. Lecter has eaten the other parts of Dortlich remains with cheese and mushroom. Yum.
Lecter then visits Kolnas’ restaurant in Fontainebleau. He finds Kolnas’ young daughter and notices Mischa’s bracelet on her. He then slips Kolnas’ dogtag into her pocket. When Kolnas finds the dogtag and with the murder of Dortlich, it puts him and the rest of the group in alert. Grutas, now a sex trafficker, dispatches a second member of the group, Zigmas Milko, to kill Lecter. Milko sneaks into Lecter’s laboratory at night with a gun, but Lecter senses his presence, and knocks him out with an injection. Just as Popil is entering the lab, Lecter drowns Milko in formaldehyde. Popil questions Lecter about Dortlich’s murder, but is again unable to establish Lecter’s guilt. Popil then tries to dissuade him from hunting the gang, and offers to let him go free if he helped locate Grutas. After Lecter leaves, Popil remarks to his assistant that Lecter lost all of his humanity when Mischa died, and has died with her too since then. Now, he is nothing but a monster.
Lecter then sets up a time bomb in Grutas’ home, and attacks him in the shower. However, a maid alerts Grutas’ bodyguards, who then rush in. Just as Grutas’ bodyguards are about to slit his throat, Lecter’s time bomb goes off and he escapes.
Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki and calls Lecter, using her as bait. Lecter recognizes the sounds of Kolnas’ ortolans from his restaurant in the background. Lecter goes there and plays on Kolnas’ emotions by threatening his children, forcing him to give up the location of Grutas’ boat. Lecter then says he will leave Kolnas alone for the sake of his family, and places his gun on the hot stove. As Kolnas goes for the gun, Lecter impales him through the head with his tanto.
After that, Lecter goes to the houseboat. Just as he is about to untie Lady Murasaki, Grutas shoots him in the back. Grutas then proceeds to rape Murasaki. Lecter takes out the tanto, which was broken by the force of the bullet, and slashes Grutas’s Achilles’ tendons with it, crippling him. In a final confrontation, Grutas claims that Lecter too had consumed his sister in broth fed to him by the soldiers, and he was killing them to keep this fact secret. Enraged, Lecter carves his sister’s initial, M, into Grutas’s chest. Lady Murasaki, finally disturbed by his behavior, flees from him even after he tells her that he loves her. As she leaves, Hannibal bites off Grutas’s cheeks in what will become his signature attack. The houseboat is then incinerated, but Lecter, assumed to be dead, emerges from the woods. The film then concludes with Lecter hunting down the last member of the group, Grentz, in Canada.
Overall, the movie is gruesome but lacks violence and action pack.
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