Revenge, as an often-quoted Italian proverb recommends, is a dish best served cold. For Hannibal Lecter, star villain of a series on the verge of becoming a cinema franchise, that adage applies in a manner both literal and subtle, satisfying two appetites at once. In Hannibal Rising, the fourth Thomas Harris novel (and fifth film) in which the brilliant, demonic killer appears, he exacts, many years after the initial provocation, a terrible retribution on a number of enemies, then consumes a tender and savory portion of their flesh.

The movie, a prequel to the other works, shows the origins, motivation, and development of the killer's signature practice, which might justly be called Hannibalism. Harris wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based, and the almost simultaneous appearance of the two suggests more than a desire to chronicle the life and times of the serial killer, but the fulfillment of a commission, a book written in order to make a film. Although the script necessarily simplifies considerable portions of the novel, omitting certain characters and complications, it retains the major sequence of action and accurately duplicates the atmosphere and texture of its source.

The film begins in 1944 at Castle Lecter, in Lithuania, where young Hannibal and his beloved sister Mischa play innocently in an idyllic sylvan setting. Their childhood ends abruptly when the German army attacks and occupies the country, forcing the Lecters to flee their ancestral home to take refuge in their hunting lodge in the forest. There, when the Russians attack from the East, the children's parents die in a battle between the two armies, and Hannibal and Mischa must face alone the worst terror, a handful of degenerate peasants recruited by the SS, who surpass their mentors in barbarism.

The desperate, starving peasants kill little Mischa and devour her, an act that traumatizes her brother and forever warps his psyche. After years in a Soviet orphanage, located in the castle, Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel) escapes and makes his way to France where the widow of his uncle, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (Gong Li) takes him in and provides him a home. An outstanding, precocious student, Hannibal enters medical school in Paris, where he studies anatomy and plots revenge on his sister's killers.

Most of the movie shows the progress of Hannibal's search for the murderers and his apparent aptitude for the task. His relentless determination, his steely calm, his absolute lack of emotion, and his powerful intellect serve him well as he goes about his business, tracking down the murderers, decapitating them, and taking his pound of flesh. At the same time he thwarts the investigation of a French detective (Dominic West) who, despite his sure knowledge of his quarry's acts, cannot find a way to prove his guilt.

Perhaps as a result of the author's influence, Hannibal Rising, like the earlier films, displays a high degree of authenticity in background and setting --- the frigid forests of Eastern Europe in 1944, the bleak villages of the Soviet puppet states, the apparatus of a 1950s French medical school, the domestic interiors, the cars and clothes all establish an atmosphere of ordinary reality around the extraordinary behavior of the protagonist. In addition, the sense of a postwar world in which all the characters bear scars of either suffering or guilt pervades the movie, suggesting that the war that created Hannibal in some way forces them all to share in his grief and his crimes.

The slender, pale Gaspard Ulliel seems to grow thinner and more bloodless as he carries out his terrible quest, recalling in fact another murderous aristocrat from a ruined castle in the East, the Transylvanian Count Dracula, with whom he shares a taste for blood. Even in a killing frenzy he maintains a virtually permanent sneer on his sharp, narrow face, reflecting both his hatred of his quarry and his general scorn for most of mankind.

Although his young Hannibal in no way suggests Anthony Hopkins, the mature monster he will become, when he tries on a Japanese warrior's mask in a moment of obvious foreshadowing, he looks very like the bound and gagged prisoner of The Silence of the Lambs. Now Hannibal Rising tells us just how he got that way.

Hannibal Rising (R), directed by Peter Webber, is now playing at Culver Ridge 16, Henrietta 18, Webster 12, Tinseltown, Greece Ridge 12, and Eastview 13.