An overlong and wildly uneven film and yet still in some ways one of the more brutally effective films of horror maestro Dario
Argento’s latter-day canon, The Stendhal
Syndrome stars the director’s daughter, Asia Argento, as a policewoman
tracking down a violent serial killer and rapist. While trading chiefly in procedural
elements not typically a part of Argento’s more explicit zombie horror flicks,
the film still manages to showcase the filmmaker’s sensory flair and great touch
in eliciting queasiness through stabbing shock.

The Pianist’s Thomas Kretschmann)
through the streets of Italy.
Along the way, she falls victim to a strange, hallucinatory phenomenon which
causes her to lose her mind and memory in front of powerful works of art (above).
Trapped in this twilight realm, Anna plunges deeper and deeper into sexual
psychosis, until she comes to know the killer’s madness more intimately than
she ever imagined.

The Stendhal Syndrome
takes what might be characterized as a few Hitchcockian elements — an imperiled
woman, a strange psychological impairment, psychosexual perversion and mirrored
identities — and places them in a blender. It’s obvious that the movie wants to
also summon forth, in its own way, elements of The Silence of the Lambs and the mid-1980s oeuvre of Shannon Tweed,
but the execution here is merely so-so for vast swatches of the movie’s
two-hour running time, and the fairer Argento, just 20 when The Stendhal Syndrome was filmed over a
decade ago, is a bit too young to pull off the necessary gravitas of a seasoned
police inspector. Anna’s hallucination sequences employ some relatively low-tech
digital effects work, but it works in a way that’s not entirely corny. That said, there’s too much wild overreaching for parallelism here for things to cohere on a structural level. Yet while it doesn’t measure up to Suspiria or Inferno, moments in the film retain papa Argento’s visceral pop
and effectiveness, so much so that certain scenes from The Stendahl Syndrome stuck with me in lingering fashion long
after its initial viewing.

Spread out over two discs and housed in a clear Amray case
with cardboard slipcover, the movie is presented in 1.66:1 widescreen, enhanced
for 16×9 televisions. There are five audio options, three in English (6.1 DTS-ES,
which requires a DTS decoder, as well as Dolby surround 2.0 and Dolby digital 5.1
surround EX. The set’s second disc is full of supplemental extras,
including interviews with Argento, special effects director Sergio Stivaletti, assistant
director Luigi Cozzi, production designer Massimo Antonello Geleng and “psychological
consultant” Graziella Magherini, whose book on the titular condition inspired
Argento to tackle the film.
To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)