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It opens with video grain and closes like a freeze-frame postcard, in between there's a brilliant study of vision under a lush policier veneer. "To recover the mindset" is key to the FBI investigation of a serial killer, a job for the haunted forensics expert (William L. Petersen), plucked out of retirement yet not quite mended. "Very purposeful-looking" but with a poignant fragility, he steps into the scene of the crime and into the murderer's mental space. "What are you dreaming?" Dubbed "the Tooth Fairy," the culprit is a broken beanpole with a moon cycle and a Blake fixation, Tom Noonan at his eeriest. "You owe me awe," he proclaims to the tabloid snoop (Stephen Lang) last glimpsed barreling toward the camera on a flaming wheelchair. The third facet is a certain Dr. Lecktor, the cultured cannibal in the blanched cage. (As the insane psychiatrist, Brian Cox has an expert sketch of malevolent hauteur, toying with a wad of gum in his mouth after jovially manipulating clerks on the phone.) Home movies, laboratory infra-reds, painted sunsets. "Everything with you is seeing, isn't it?" Michael Mann's expressionism is an advancement on Pakula's technique, the concentrated style of clinical pulp. The hazy green of grass outside a geometric mental institution, the charged champ contre champ of father and son in a kaleidoscopic supermarket aisle, above all the hands of a sightless coworker (Joan Allen) caressing a sedated tiger's fanged muzzle to encapsulate the strikingly sensorial approach. A view of a victim with glowing eyes and mouth evokes Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase, the climax is a superb dilation of Wait Until Dark. ("In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" perfectly provides the sacramental organ and guitar screeches for "the activities of nocturnal animals.") Demme in The Silence of the Lambs follows the horror of empathy with the empathy of horror. Cinematography by Dante Spinotti. With Kim Greist, Dennis Farina, and David Seaman Jr.
--- Fernando F. Croce |