The seeming shapelessness of the first three hours is really just the show’s fluid visual and thematic content being matched structurally. Instead of a police procedural, the opening handful of episodes play like a collection of short films. “Antipasto” manipulates colour and aspect ratios as it glides forward and backward through time like a European arthouse film. The third hour turns a mostly abandoned castle into a Gothic haunted manor. And the second episode features maybe the single most surreally %$#@ed up image I’ve ever seen on television –some things, thankfully, haven’t changed.
Hannibal’s continued use of uncanny dream logic and its Grimm new setting feed into a “fairy tale” feel the characters make reference to, but season 3 adds hints of science fiction to the show’s already versatile palette. At its best, the stark, swimmy, and impressionistic look of the show rivals that of 2014’s Under the Skin, an enigmatic and mesmerizing visual tale of alien creatures stalking the European countryside. The phantasma-gore-ia of Will’s hallucinations and Hannibal’s death tableaus are as striking as ever, but even the most lucid moment is suffused with an otherworldly allure. This is a show that’s not satisfied unless it has you jumping at shadows, beautiful as they might be when lensed by cinematographer James Hawkinson.
The creative continuity Hannibal maintains visually (Vincenzo Natali directs the first three episodes) is just as present in the writing, and it’s where the third season’s gambles will live or die. The weekly investigations of seasons 1 and 2 would space out the hour with routine forensic babble and suspect profiling. While never Hannibal’s main draw, the technical talk did give the show a chance to break from the theoretical and existential discussions it has a tendency to overindulge on. Every word out of Hannibal is double-stuffed with meaning and menace, and it’s when the show is at its most verbose that any artifice peaks out from behind the refined exterior. (Perhaps out of awareness of this fact, “Antipasto” builds an exchange heavy with double-entendre into a gut-busting moment of misread social cues).
It’s because Hannibal makes what it does look so effortless that individual contributions can be lost in the bloody swell of the whole. Series composer Brian Reitzell bolsters the incredible sound design with added traces of ‘70s keyboard psychedelia and supernal synth. Without Mikkelsen’s measured performance and understated charisma, we wouldn’t get the guilty charge that comes with watching Hannibal orchestrate his designs. But it’s Dancy’s wounded vulnerability that elevates the show above being just an aesthetically pleasing abattoir. Anderson’s expanded role is part of the season’s developing look into the part of your brain and soul that’s drawn to the darkest corners of the imagination. The visceral splendour of the show is what pulls you in, but it’s the psychological complexity of Hannibal’s characters that adds depth to the surface. Every hour is an emotional turducken, with outward terror enveloping Fuller’s giddy showmanship, that itself masks a sorrowful heart at Hannibal’s core.
The further down this mad rabbit hole Fuller wants to take us, the messier Hannibal becomes, intentionally so. This is a story about relationships, about the instinctive intimacy that develops between hunters and hunted, and how depravity isn’t the antithesis of humanity, but just another face of it. The first episode ends with a heart-shaped Valentine from Hannibal to Will, and its placement in the Hannibal pantheon of nightmare-fuel imagery will be self-evident once you see it. But it’s an exquisite, frightening distillation of the connection Hannibal and Hannibal are searching for in the dark. “I’ve taken off my person suit,” Lecter says to Bedelia in the premiere (Anderson, looking as though she were born to hold a gun in one hand and a tumbler of liquor in the other). Now that he’s exposed himself, the doctor’s downfall looks to be the most satisfying meal that Fuller has yet to serve up. Buon appetito.
