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 story centers around Anna Manni (Argento), a beautiful detective following the bloody trail of a sophisticated serial criminal (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, does The Stendhal Syndrome induce its own hallucinatory stupor? No, 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, a handful of 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.

Previously edited outside of Italy, The Stendhal Syndrome is presented here in stunning high definition, transferred under the supervision of cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (Amarcord) from the original Italian 35mm interpositive. Split into two dozen chapters, the film is presented in 1.66:1 widescreen in 1080p HD resolution, with four audio options — English 7.1 DTS-HD, English 7.1 Dolby True HD, English 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX and Italian 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX — as well as optional English subtitles. Imported from the movie’s previous DVD release via Blue Underground are a wonderful series of in-depth widescreen interviews, each of which is conducted in Italian, with additional English subtitles.

Running just under 20 minutes, the first interview is with Dario Argento himself, who discusses where The Stendhal Syndrome fits within his filmography, and where the idea for the film came from. The second interview, running roughly the same length, is with psychological consultant Graziella Magherini, who actually named the curious illness that gives the movie its title. Assistant director Luigi Cozzi discusses his three decade-plus personal and professional relationship with the elder Argento, and his impressions of the filmmaker’s daughter, and her slow gravitation toward her father’s work. Similarly, production designer Massimo Antonello Geleng also chats about style Argento, and the darker visual style that he employs for this film. The fifth and final segment focuses on the movie’s special effects, and runs a bit shorter than the other interviews; still, it’s interesting to hear from Sergio Stivaletti about his working relationship with Argento, and why the filmmaker chose to use CGI for the first (and only) time in his career. To purchase the movie on Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)