Clarice Starling is a sharp, ambitious FBI trainee sent to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist serving life in prison for a series of murders. The Bureau needs his insight to help catch a different killer, one who has been abducting and murdering women. What follows is a series of carefully controlled exchanges between Clarice and Lecter, in which the line between getting information and being manipulated becomes increasingly hard to read. The film is a psychological thriller about intelligence, predation, and the cost of pursuing the darkest cases.