The Stendhal Syndrome is a recognized reaction and was so prior to this movie. The syndrome mimics anxiety symptoms followed by fainting after seeing either great art or too much of it at one time. Sounds harmless enough until Dario Argento decides to use it and his daughter to tell a stylized thriller.

The synopsis is that there is a serial rapist-cum-killer who starts in Rome then moves to Florence and back again. The rapist Alfredo (Thomas Kretschmann) tries first to help Anna (Asia Argento), who is a detective with the “anti-rape” division, when she faints in the Uffizi from Stendhal Syndrome (though her version seems to be more that she hears the people in the paintings talk rather than just have a general sense of anxiety). From here he finds her and rapes her, but he doesn’t kill her. The detective in Anna is driven to find him, but the obsession drives her in many directions at once.

I want to cover the sound first because it is what would be noticed first. Ennio Morricone’s music is dissonant and grating and sets the mood for the movie better than any other thriller I’ve seen, mainly because it seems never to let up. The first ten minutes are without dialog except for the heavy murmurs Anna hears from the paintings, so what you have is the music. After this, the screams begin. The screams will curdle milk two farms over. This is the only movie that my cat has hated (she isn’t a movie fan but sits with me, this movie scared her terribly).

Despite being filmed in 1996, it has a 1970s porn film feel about it. It is strangely dubbed so that the sound doesn’t quite match the people. But what is strange isn’t that the dubbing is done over Italian. It is just very bad looping because the actors speak English (a bad lip reader would be able to see that) and it is pretty obvious that the people who spoke for the actors may have known the script but really lost the sense of expression the actors sought to portray—dialog not matching the expressions on faces for instance. This is a mild annoyance.

The film is disturbing but really is a treat for the eye even if it tends toward the graphically violent. As I said, this is a stylized film; a maven of the slasher flicks from the 1980s on will probably not like Stendhal much because far more time is spent creating the mood and instilling confusion than ratcheting up the body count.

The acting doesn’t get in the way of the story, but it isn’t the focus. The characters in the setting is the important thing. Argento is also a master of the montage. Like David Lynch, Argento likes to mix the ugly or gross with the beautiful. Friends of mine cannot stand that because it is sort of like peanut-butter and tuna to them (I can see their point but still . . .). This is a very difficult trope to manage because the gut pulls away while the eyes are pulled toward. Go too far and it is either too gross or just too stupid. Argento’s eye and Morricone’s ear create a perfect mood even if it is exhausting after 100 minutes of never quite letting up.

It is hard to know how to recommend this film. I don’t want to give away the plot at all, but if you have liked other stylized and violent European thriller/horror films, then you will like this film. And it should be pretty obvious just how much influence this film had on the recent batch of Euro thriller/horror flicks. I could name half a dozen but they would spoil a plot that is sincere but borderline out of control.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good Date Movie