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‘Hannibal Rising’: A serial killer cuts his teeth

Has any movie fan watched “Silence of the Lambs” and not wondered what twisted, horrific event(s) could have made Hannibal Lecter the way he is?

For years, fans have pinged Thomas Harris, Lecter’s creator, with that question. Now, with a screenplay adapted from his novel, Harris delivers answers — some, anyway — in “Hannibal Rising,” about the formative years of everybody’s favorite flesh-eating bon vivant.

The story begins in Lithuania in 1944, where young Hannibal (Aaron Thomas) enjoys an idyllic childhood with his adored younger sister Mischa (Helena Lia Tachovska) in the huge castle of their aristocratic parents.

But a little dust-up called World War II is heading toward a bloody end, and Castle Lecter is in a bad spot — smack in the path of retreating Germans and onrushing Russians.

The family abandons the castle for its remote hunting lodge, which only delays the inevitable. Soon enough, the war is on their doorstep, in the form of a spectacular close-up crash of a German fighter plane into a Soviet tank (an amazing bit of special-effects cinematography).

With their parents killed in the mayhem, Hannibal and Mischa are left to fend for themselves in the lodge — until the arrival of a band of filthy local thugs who had cast their lot with the Germans and only recently came to the realization that they signed on with the losing team.

With the Russians teeming through the area, the thugs — led by the feral Grutas (Rhys Ifans) and their nominal moral conscience, Kolnas (Kevin McKidd, who plays Lucius Vorenus in HBO’s “Rome”), are stuck in midwinter with no food.

“We eat, or die,” Grutas grunts, and all eyes turn toward chubby little Mischa and her brother, chained on a second-floor landing.

The film then jumps eight years, revealing what happened in the lodge in subsequent snippets of the nightmares that plague the now-teenage Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) as he goes about plotting and carrying out his revenge on the thugs, most of whom are in France and still neck-deep in criminal activities.

As Lecter cuts a gruesome swath through his former tormentors, the seeds of his major character traits are sown — his gourmet appreciation for the taste of human flesh, his equally violent distaste for rude and boorish behavior, his mania for imbuing the deaths of his victims with symbolism, his vast surgical skills.

But one thing the film doesn’t have is Anthony Hopkins — and that’s no small drawback.

Ulliel, a French actor, lays it on a bit thick at times, seemingly channeling Bela Lugosi when he intones “Good eeeeeevening” to Inspector Popil (Dominic West), the French cop on his trail. Ulliel also overdoes the stare-up-from-under-the-eyebrows thing that Hopkins used to such chilling effect in “Silence of the Lambs.”

These feel like affectations that would not be expected to develop until later in life — after Lecter fully refined his taste for fava beans, chianti and braised human liver. (Mmm ... thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip.)

Another large problem is the character of Lady Murasaki (Gong Li), the beautiful Japanese wife of Lecter’s late uncle, who becomes his first muse.

In the novel, Lady Murasaki seemed conflicted, by turns subtly encouraging and discouraging Lecter’s grisly pursuits. Harris had lots of room to shape the character on the page, but the film version feels half-formed.

Harris also never definitively reveals his views on whether the roots of Lecter’s psychosis are the product of nature or nurture.

Lecter’s yen to kill Grutas and his mates is easy to understand. But even given what happened in that hunting lodge, his zeal for then noshing on them feels off-key — at least until the climactic confrontation late in the film when Grutas reveals something that brings Lecter’s festering madness into full, terrifying bloom (guaranteed to make neck hairs stand up and dance).

Someone coming to this film cold, with no prior knowledge of Hannibal Lecter, likely would leave slightly nauseated, wondering what the fuss is about.

But while it leaves important issues unresolved, longtime fans of this franchise will find that this portrait of the cannibal as a young man fleshes out crucial holes in the saga of one of the most repulsively fascinating fictional characters of our time.

3 stars. Rated R for extreme violence.